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At 7:03 that morning, I heard the sliding door upstairs open.
I didn’t look up immediately.
I kept my coffee in my hand and pretended to be reading something on my phone.
For the past three weeks, I had learned the rhythm of apartment 4B better than I wanted to.
The television usually came on around six-thirty.
The balcony door opened sometime after seven.
Then came the tea.
Every morning.
Every evening.
Sometimes more than once.
I heard footsteps overhead.
A chair scraped against the balcony floor.
Then silence.
I glanced at the clock.
7:04.
A shadow appeared across the railing above me.
Then his hand came into view.
Two fingers held a small, dripping tea bag by its string.
He released it.
The tea bag dropped toward my balcony.
Except this time, it didn’t land where he expected.
It stopped halfway.
A small nylon mesh stretched across the upper edge of my balcony railing caught it perfectly.
The tea bag bounced once and hung there, dripping.
I slowly stood up.
Above me, there was silence.
I looked at the tea bag.
Then I looked upward.
His hand disappeared.
A second later, his head appeared over the railing.
He stared at the mesh.
Then at me.
I raised my coffee cup.
“Good morning.”
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he disappeared back inside.
I waited.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
Then his balcony door slammed shut.
I smiled.
Not because I had won anything.
I hadn’t.
But because for the first time in weeks, the problem was no longer invisible.
I took a photograph.
Then I removed the tea bag from the mesh, placed it inside a small plastic bag, and labeled it with the date and time.
April 14.
7:04 a.m.
Tea bag.
I had started keeping records two days earlier.
Not because I wanted revenge.
Because I had finally realized that if this continued, I needed proof.
The afternoon before, I had gone to the hardware store and bought the mesh.
It wasn’t a trap.
It wasn’t dangerous.
It was simply a lightweight balcony screen designed to keep leaves and debris from blowing through.
I installed it along the upper inside edge of my railing.
Anything tossed from above would hit the screen before reaching my balcony.
I had also purchased a small outdoor camera.
It pointed only toward my balcony and the section of railing above it.
I deliberately positioned it so that it didn’t look into his apartment.
I didn’t want to spy on him.
I wanted evidence of what landed on my property.
There was another reason I had prepared so carefully.
Two days earlier, something had happened that made me realize the tea bags weren’t just annoying anymore.
My downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Alvarez, had knocked on my door.
She was seventy-eight and lived in apartment 2B.
She stood there holding a small plastic bag.
Inside was a soggy tea bag.
“I found this outside my window,” she said.
I stared at it.
“From upstairs?”
She nodded.
“I think so.”
“Has he been throwing them toward your apartment too?”
She hesitated.
“I didn’t want to complain.”
“Why not?”
She smiled sadly.
“People don’t like being called difficult.”
That sentence stayed with me.
People don’t like being called difficult.
It was the exact reason I had kept quiet for so long.
I didn’t want to be the difficult woman downstairs.
The overly sensitive neighbor.
The person who complained about everything.
So I had accepted it.
A stained towel.
A stained cushion.
Tea bags beside my plants.
Tea bags on my welcome mat.
Once, one landed inside the open door of my apartment.
I cleaned them up.
I said nothing.
But now I knew Mrs. Alvarez was dealing with it too.
And she wasn’t the only one.
Over the next day, I quietly asked two other neighbors whether they had experienced the same thing.
They had.
One had found tea bags on his windowsill.
Another had discovered one in a planter.
Nobody had complained formally.
Everyone had simply decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
That was when I understood what my upstairs neighbor had been counting on.
Not that people couldn’t stop him.
That people wouldn’t bother.
So I bothered.
Not angrily.
Methodically.
The first morning after I installed the screen, I expected him to stop.
Instead, he adapted.
At 9:17 that night, another tea bag came flying over the railing.
It struck the screen and dropped onto my balcony floor.
I looked at the camera.
The red indicator light blinked.
I picked up the tea bag.
Photographed it.
Recorded the time.
Then I went inside.
The next morning, another appeared.
Then another that evening.
For five days, it continued.
Seven tea bags.
Five photographs.
Five videos.
And one very irritated man upstairs.
On the sixth day, I heard him shouting from his balcony.
“Hey!”
I looked up.
He was standing there.
“You put that net up because of me?”
I took a sip of coffee.
“I put it up because things keep falling onto my balcony.”
“You know exactly what you’re doing.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.”
He stared at me.
“Take it down.”
“No.”
His face hardened.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He leaned over the railing.
“You can’t just put things up there whenever you want.”
“I checked the building rules.”
He paused.
“I did too.”
“Then you know the screen is allowed.”
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he pointed toward the mesh.
“That thing is ugly.”
I shrugged.
“You’re entitled to your opinion.”
Then I went inside.
I thought that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t.
That evening, someone knocked on my door.
When I opened it, the building manager, Mr. Collins, stood in the hallway.
He was holding a clipboard.
“Can we talk?”
“Of course.”
He stepped inside.
“I’ve received a complaint.”
“From apartment 4B?”
He nodded.
“He says you’ve installed some kind of barrier that interferes with his balcony.”
