Page 70 of Cruel Lies

19

CALI

I wake up in Ronan Akov's shirt with my hair crunchy from chlorine and my heart doing a happy little two-step jig in my chest.

This is not a normal way to feel about a man. I'm a thirty-four-year-old mother of two in the middle of a divorce, and I have no business waking up feeling like a teenager who got asked to prom by the boy she thinks is the one. It's undignified. It's ill-advised.

But my heart just won't stop dancing.

I lie there for a while with my eyes closed, replaying the whole absurd blue evening. I press the shirt collar to my nose. Chlorine, and under it, him. Sandalwood, but darker than Todd's. Not the drugstore version. The real stuff. Thegoodstuff.

Get up, Cali,I tell myself.You have children arriving in three hours and you smell like a public pool.

I peel myself out of bed and pad into the bathroom to start the long project of unchlorinating my life.

And then I stop.

Because the wall is bare.

There's a perfect rectangle of paint two shades darker than the rest of the wall, right where the mirror used to be. The big one, the one that came with the house, the one I've stood in front of every single morning of the last six years.

It's… gone?

My first thought is:someone was in my house.

My skin goes tight all over. I look at the empty rectangle, then at the door, as I listen intently for sounds of an intruder.

But there's nothing. The normal city noise outside the walls.

I walk out into the hall on unsteady legs. Two steps out, I stop and suppress a shriek.

The hallway mirror is gone, too.

Sensing a theme, I pick up speed.

The one by the front door: gone.

Guest bathroom: gone.

The compact-sized magnetic one on the fridge: gone.

By now, I've stopped breathing in any organized way. This is not a robbery. Robbers do not take the mirrors and leave the television. This was somebody with a specific intent and a great deal of patience, moving through my home in the dark while I slept.

I have a feeling I know whose ghosts these are.

I go downstairs to the kitchen and check the little wall-mounted tablet where the camera feeds live. Todd installed these back when he wanted to feel like the man of the house.

I cue up the front camera and scroll back.

And there is exactly what I was expecting: a gap.

The span from 11:52 P.M. to 4:16 A.M is just straight-up missing. As if the hours simply declined to happen. When I check the interior cameras, it's the same. Someone reached into the digital record of my own home and snipped out the exact window in which they walked through it.

"The appropriate response to this," I announce to the empty room, "is calling the police."

The room does not disagree.

"I'm aware of that," I add, because I'm feeling a little bit judged. "I am fully, completely aware that a reasonable woman calls the police."