Page 152 of Cruel Lies

I retreat to stand in the doorway for a minute and watch him breathe. Then I pull the door most of the way shut, leaving the crack of hallway light he still likes even though he'd never admit it.

From there, I don't make it very far.

I get exactly as far as the top of the stairs, the little landing between the two bedroom doors, before my legs give out and I drop down hard on the top step.

And I cry.

It comes all at once. But this is worse than my last cry, because this time I'm not crying about a spreadsheet or a company or a lie on a screen. I'm crying about a man who got down on his knees on the floor of my daughter's bedroom and said goodnight to a caterpillar. A man who read to my son about tube worms and asked thoughtful questions. A man who made pancakes. A man who told me I was beautiful every single morning for weeks on end.

A man who was lying the whole time.

I cry for my kids, who asked about him tonight and will ask about him tomorrow and the day after, and I'll have to keep lying until they stop asking, until he becomes another man who was in their lives for a season and then wasn't, until they learn whatI learned young, which is that people leave and there's usually nothing you could've done to make them stay.

I cry for myself, for the version of me that let herself believe it. The version that stripped off her dress in a tank hanging over the ocean because she finally felt weightless. The version that stopped looking for mirrors. The version that saidI love you, too, Ronan Akov, and meant it.

That version is dead now.

I killed her in an elevator this afternoon and shut my eyes so I wouldn't have to watch her die.

I sit there on the top step with my face in my hands and I let it all come out, because the kids are asleep and there's no one to perform for, and I think, in some distant part of me, that this is the last of it. I'll cry it out here on the stairs and then I'll get up and I'll be New Cali again, the one who fights, the one who builds the spreadsheet and salts the earth.

Just get it out. Just let it go. Then get up.

That's when my phone pings.

It's on the step beside me, screen-down. A soft little chime. Under any other circumstances, it wouldn't mean anything at all. A text. An email. A calendar reminder that the kids have camp tomorrow.

I turn it over and wipe my eyes so I can read it.

BioInfo Smart Scale — new weigh-in registered.

I stop breathing.

The world goes very quiet and very sharp, the way it did in a hotel room in Phoenix a lifetime ago, the way it did standing inmy own bedroom looking at hospital corners folded at a forty-five-degree angle.

I know this feeling. And I know what it means.

It means someone stood on the scale in my bathroom.

The bathroom is at the end of the hall. Twenty feet from where I'm sitting.

I open the app with hands that don't feel like mine. The last entry blinks at the top of the list, fresh, the timestamp less than a minute old.

228.1 lbs.

I stare at the number.

I weigh what I weigh, and it isn't that. My mother is at her own house tonight. Todd is holed up somewhere amidst the ruins of his life. The kids don't weigh anything close to that, even combined, and both of them are asleep behind their doors, I just left them, I heard them breathing.

Two hundred and twenty eight pounds belongs to nobody who should be in my house.

The same notification of dread that opened this whole terrible story is opening it again, except this time there's not three thousand miles between me and the scale. It's right there. I'm right here.

And a stranger is standing in my house in the dark.

I don't call the police. By the time anyone arrives, whatever is about to happen will be long over.

I check the cameras instead. Todd's cameras, the ones he installed a lifetime ago so he could keep an eye on the babysitter and, I now understand, on me. The app takes forever to load. I watch the little spinning wheel and I feel my pulse in my teeth.