Page 24

CONNOR: Last minute shopping is a bitch. Might be a while. The mall is a zoo.

I don’t answer it. I open the map instead.

Connor and I have shared our phone locations for years. We set it up back when we liked each other, mostly for airport pickups and to confirm that the other person wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

He has almost certainly forgotten it exists.

But in this case, he doesn’t seem to be lying? Or at least, he’s where he says he is.

His dot sits at the Kings Plaza mall, almost certainly surrounded by every other husband in Brooklyn who started shopping today at noon.

So I have the house to myself, and a warning system for when my backstabbing spouse decides to meander back home.

“Take your time, sweetheart,” I say to the windshield.

I go inside, take a seat at the kitchen table, and prop my phone up where I can keep an eye on it, just like I had it at the bakery when Vivian’s stupid photos ruined my life. Then I get to work.

Because today still needs one more thing. I have the videos and the album screenshots. I have the burnt corner with my forged name on it, and the hotel receipt from the night of my father’s funeral. Dates and paper abound.

What I don’t have yet is them—his words and hers, the two of them conspiring in writing. That’s the last gap in the evidence, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of how I’m gonna get my hands on it.

Mom told me to go easy on Vivian, to give her grace.

Well, I’m about to read her texts with my husband.

We’ll see how much “grace” I have left over after that.

Every marriage worth its filing fee has a junk drawer full of accumulated crap. We’re no different than anyone else in that regard.

Going through it is like becoming an archaeologist for a while. I’m Indiana Jones, dusting off takeout menus from a Thai place that closed during the pandemic, an AAA card that expired when Obama was president, a handful of broken chip clips and bent-out-of-shape staples, a bottle opener from somebody’s wedding with the date printed on it, two chargers for phones that no longer exist on this earth.

Underneath all of it, face-down and forgotten, is the iPad.

We bought it for recipes. That was the plan, at least. Back when I had pep in my step, I’d come home from a day filled with baking just so I could start baking some more.

When the bakery started consuming more and more of my life, free time, and will to persevere, the iPad became Connor’s in-flight entertainment so he didn’t have to squint at the seatback screen.

In practice, I’ve cooked maybe four things off it and he watched half of Gladiator on the way to a work trip in Orlando.

The essential bit here is that he’s still signed in.

He insisted on doing it, as a matter of fact. If I let you take control, you’ll just ask me what your password is a billion times a day. Let me.

He snatched it out of my hands, still in its plastic wrapping, and did it all himself.

Hoisted by his own petard, as they say. I mean, I think someone says that. Truth be told, I’m not one hundred percent sure what it means.

It’s stone-cold dead, though, so the hoisting will have to wait a minute.

I dig the matching cable out from under the menus, plug it in behind the toaster, and then stand in place and wait for the logo of the little apple with a bite taken out of it to appear.

While I wait, I have plenty of time to review every mistake in my life that led me here. I offer a silent apology to Tonya Blackburn, for secretly putting gum in her hair in second grade after she cut me in line for kickball. Maybe that was my first sin, and everything that’s followed is downstream of it.

Worth a quick sorry, if nothing else.

Finally, the logo appears. I go over my plan again as the home screen loads.

I can’t screenshot anything or open any unread messages. The second I do, it’ll get synced to the cloud, and I’m not dumb enough to make the same mistakes that got Vivian caught.