Page 21 of Cruel Lies

The FindMy heat map.

That's seven good pieces of evidence. But frustratingly, I feel more like a conspiracy theorist than a woman with an open-and-shut case. The problem, I realize, is thatIknow what I'm looking at, but I don't want it to be some huge secret that requires a ten-part documentary series to fully comprehend. I want it to be blindingly obvious to anyone who walks in off the street.

So I do what I'd do for any client. I do what I pitched, feverish and underslept, to a room full of venture capitalists in Phoenix on the worst weekend of my life.

I feed it all into the stack.

My company's whole thing—the actual product, the reason Emmett Glover blocked off twenty minutes of his Crown-Jewels calendar for me—is a predictive-analytics engine that takes disconnected, multi-source, timestamped data and finds the story inside it.

It correlates the streams. Surfaces the pattern. Outputs one clean, undeniable picture.

I built it to help logistics companies find fraud in their supply chains.

Turns out it works just as well on a cheating husband.

So I feed the beast and sit back as it whirs to life. While I drink my coffee, it maps the scale entries against the FindMy clusters against the text threads against the pickup logs against the listening history.

God help me, I feelalive.

And then the dashboard loads.

One screen. One timeline. Each and every stream is stacked and correlated, color-coded, every lie cross-referenced against every other lie, the whole eighteen-month architecture of my husband's betrayal laid out so cleanly that no one in their right mind could deny the outcome.

I want to celebrate. And I do, for a second. I do a squiggly little dance right there in the chair.

But when I'm done dancing, I slump back, though I'm not quite sure why. What's missing? What more could possibly be needed? I don't know, but that feeling of incompleteness just won't go away.

I go about my day, nagged constantly by that feeling, like the space in your gums after a tooth falls out. I can't stop tonguing at it, wondering what it is that simply doesn't make sense.

That night, when I get home…

The universe shows me what it is.

The kids are with my mom for the night and Todd is having a boys' night at the cigar bar, which means the house is quiet enough that I can hear my own pulse when I sit down at the kitchen island with my laptop and a glass of the Sancerre I've been rationing.

I'm not planning to find anything else. My paranoia that I'm missing something is just that: paranoia. Seven receipts is plenty, especially when they've been arranged into a dashboard that practically gleams. Once I find the right divorce attorney,I'm going to drop this on their desk and they will weep tears of joy.

The gathering phase is over. Tomorrow, I move into logistics—thehowand thewhenand thewhere do I want to be standing when his entire life turns to shit.

But that nagging gap in my gums won't quit. So, on a whim, I chase down one last little thing.

Santorini.

The trip.

Ourtrip.

Blue domes, a sunset in Oia, the whole shimmering reason I was eating sad grapefruit for breakfast and stepping on that traitorous scale every morning. A celebration of ten years of love.

I log into the travel portal. We booked through one of those white-glove concierge services because Todd likes to feel like a big shot, which mostly revolves around a human being on the phone calling himMr. Bradshawin a hushed, reverent voice.

The reservation is still there. Same resort. Same caldera-view suite. Same dates in June.

But it's been modified.

There's a little revision history. I open it.

Traveler 1: T. Bradshaw.