Phil opened my fridge like he lived there and said, my building, I go where I want. So I pointed at the small camera I had mounted over my own doorway in May, told him it had recorded his last nine entries with timestamps, and mentioned that the tenant board hearing had been scheduled for the fourteenth since Tuesday.
Because I had stopped saying nothing and started keeping proof. Two years of him walking in with no notice, sometimes while I was in the shower, and after the last time I had put a camera over my door, so the next entry would be on record.
For two years the only thing I had lacked was evidence, and the moment a camera watched my own doorway, the renter who thinks she owns the place became a tenant with nine timestamped videos of a landlord entering illegally.
My neighbors door was open across the hall. She had had the same thing happen in June, and she was listening, because she knew this fight and had lost it in silence herself.
I did not scream and I did not shove him out. I said, that camera over the door has your last nine entries, each with a date and a time, none of them with the notice the law requires. The tenant board hearing is on the fourteenth. You can keep telling people I think I own the place, but a board is about to watch you let yourself in nine times.
The footage was the footage. There is no my-building-ing your way out of nine timestamped illegal entries in front of a tenant board.
The board did what two years of my objecting never could. Faced with the recordings, they ordered Phil to give proper written notice before every entry, and put him on record that another violation meant real penalties.
I stopped needing a chair against my door. My neighbor across the hall filed her own account alongside mine, and Phil learned that the whole floor could see him now.
He does not walk in anymore. He texts, twenty-four hours ahead, like the law always said he had to. Two years of being walked in on ended not with a shouting match, but with one camera over my own door, and it turned out the renter who thinks she owns the place was just the only one who finally hit record.