An acquaintance of mine was robbed last week.

She lives, along with her husband and their two kids, in a two-story house with a partially exposed basement. Both the basement and their kitchenette area have sliding glass doors.

In the middle of Thursday night, she woke thinking she had heard something. When she didn't hear anything else, she went back to sleep. In the morning, she went downstairs and her slider was slightly open and the door to the attached garage was partially open.

She said she never even considered that they had been robbed; she just thought one of the boys had left the sliding door ajar and the wind or suction or something had caused the other one to open.

She got ready for work and was set to leave. That's when she realized that she couldn't find her purse. Even then, she said she didn't think robbery. She just thought she must have left it in her car.

When she went in the garage, she found that the door from the garage to outside was open also and that her purse was not in her car. That's when she figured out what had happened.

The thief had come up on their deck, got in through the slider (which she can't swear was locked, but she thinks was), stole her purse and her briefcase, and left by way of the door to the garage and then outside. The police found muddy men's size footprints and no fingerprints.

There were four other houses hit on our side of town the same night. Did I mention she lives two blocks from us?

She lost $5 cash; that's all she had in her purse (and she and her husband are both lawyers!). She had taken most of the papers out of her briefcase to work on and hadn't put them back, so she didn't lose much work-wise. Though she knew not to keep her social security card in her purse (you all know not to do that, right?), she did have a paystub in her purse. Of course, her social security number was on her paystub.

She and her husband have signed up for some kind of monitoring service on their credit cards that watches for fraudulent charges and other signs of identity theft. And they bought curtains for their basement sliding door. And deadbolts for the doors into the garage and into the house from the garage. And they're faithfully using bars in their sliding doors now.

She says she lies awake at night listening. She can't stop thinking about what might have happened if the thief had decided to come upstairs, after her husband's wallet, for example.

The biggest loss, of course, is their sense of security. And some of mine, too.