Page 18 of Cruel Lies

I feelcompetent.

This is what I'm good at. Taking a chaos of scattered, meaningless, deniable little fragments and building them into a structure so airtight that no jury, no lawyer, no smug man-child with an oversized watch could ever knock it down.

I open a fresh spreadsheet and start to pour out everything I already know or suspect. It's a torrent of suspicions, and the more I type, the more savage I feel.

But it's not enough. Not quite yet. The hungry cursor blinks at me, a patient predator, waiting for more.

Don't worry,I reassure it.There's a lot more coming soon.

Down the hall, my husband is sleeping the easy, dreamless sleep of a man who thinks he's already won.

I crack my knuckles and dive back in.

6

CALI

Heartbreak: incredibly good fuel for productivity.

Who knew?

I always assumed being cheated on would turn me useless. A puddle of a person, leaking saltwater tears onto my many throw pillows, unable to do more than rotate slowly between the couch and the freezer where I keep the good ice cream. That's what they show you in the movies. A woman in an oversized cardigan, watching the rain, being sad in a tasteful, sepia-toned, soundtracked-by-Adele kind of way.

But it turns out that when you take the energy you would have spent loving your husband and redirect it entirely toward documenting his crimes, you become a machine.

A lean, sleepless, terrifyingly efficient machine.

Over the next three weeks, I do not cry once.

Igather.

The first thing I do is give my scale a big, sloppy smooch.

I don't disconnect it. God, no. The scale is my star witness. I just go into the BioInfo app and turn off the cheerful little beeping, so Todd's stupid mistress can keep merrily weighing herself in my bathroom without either of them knowing the device is broadcasting her every visit straight to a server I have full read access to.

And weigh herself she does. Paula Sampson, it turns out, has the body-checking habits of a woman who really does believe she needs to lose five pounds. Every single time she's in my house, she steps on my scale.

142.3.

141.8.

142.6.

Each entry is a little flag planted in the timeline. A Tuesday afternoon. A Thursday afternoon. A Saturday morning. The exact windows I personally gift-wrapped and handed to my husband when I told him I'd be at "therapy."

I export the log to a CSV, then sort them by timestamp and feel that cold, fanged thing in my chest stretch and yawn, satisfied.

Welcome to the dataset, Paula.

The second receipt finds me.

It's a Sunday morning and Isabella climbs into my lap with her iPad, pink case sticky with what I can only hope is juice. "Mommy, the dress-up game logged me out and it wants Daddy's password and I don'tknowDaddy's password."

"Here, baby, let me see."

I take the tablet and tap into settings, intending to do nothing more sinister than reset a six-year-old's access to a game where you put hats on a cartoon llama.

But as I'm doing exactly that, a gift falls right into my waiting arms. A little bubble of a notification, sliding down from the top of the screen.