Page 20 of Cruel Lies

Youtrust.

That's my mistake.

The premeditation of it is so savage that it takes my breath away. I have to meditate for a minute or two until my heartbeat climbs back down and the icy sense of operator's calm settles back over me.

When I'm good again, I add it to the folder. I keep going.

The rest of it falls like dominos.

I pull the school pickup sign-out logs from the PS 234 parent portal. It tripped my attention a while back that Todd, in his sudden and abrupt flowering as an Involved Dad, had been so eager to take up this parental obligation. But he's been dutifully scanning his badge at dismissal three days a week for the last year and a half.

I remember being baffled by it. A man who called the PTA "a coven of bitches and witches" was suddenly volunteering for car line? It made no sense.

Now, I get why. It's doing two things at once.

Firstly and most obviously, it lets him and Paula connect. Maybe they just chat and flirt, or maybe they tumble into a janitor'scloset or empty classroom so they can paw all over each other, his tie flopping undone, her pencil skirt shoved up over her?—

No. Best not to picture it. It doesn't make me sick so much as it makes melivid.

Secondly, Todd picking up the kids every week is laying the groundwork for a doozy of a custody case.Look how present I am!it screams to a potential family court judge.Look how hands-on, look how devoted.

But when I add it to my growing data set, it starts to say something else.

Look how fucked he's going to be.

The next bit is even simpler and more laughable. On a whim, I check Spotify, because we share an account.The listening history is timestamped. And there, on a Thursday afternoon at 2:51 PM—cross-referenced between a 142.1 on the scale and amiss you alreadyon the iPad—is a song.

"Wonderful Tonight" by Eric Clapton.

My stomach does another loop-de-loop.

That's the song that played at the bowling alley during our first date, and then again at our wedding, during our first dance. Both times, I had my arms around his neck and my head on his chest, and he sang the words in my ear, all out of tune but perfect in the moment nonetheless.

Now, it's the song he plays while he's screwing my best friend in some hotel room across town.

I add it to the folder. I don't even feel sad about it. I just feel one more thing click into place.

One more receipt.

The next piece requires a bit more finesse. I download Todd's FindMy location history and write a script. Just a quick little one. A few hundred lines of Python at the guest room desk while he snores like a wooly mammoth in the other room.

The script ingests the location data and clusters it. Then it renders the whole thing as a heat map. A year of my marriage, rendered in color. The places where he lied glow red.

I sit back and look at it and I think, with a kind of detached, professional pride:That's good work, Cali. That's clean.

By the end of the third week, I start to feel like I've got something. I quickly summarize what I've gathered:

The BioInfo scale log.

The Spotify history.

The iPad mirror with the text threads.

The three DocuSign envelopes.

My company foundation paperwork.

The school pickup records.