“It’s an AJC article,” Caesar says. “An old one, about Ethan and his family. Marisa read it twice in the past month.”
I’m gripping the back of Caesar’s chair so hard that my hand starts to hurt. I let go of the chair and flex my fingers. I don’t need to read the article—I already know what it says.
I know everything about your mom, Marisa said in my classroom last Friday. About what happened to you and your parents. I read the news reports. They hurt you and your family. But I knew from the moment we met that I could help you. I did this for you, Ethan. I would do anything for you.
Frankie is reading the article on Caesar’s screen. “Jesus,” he says.
“Caesar,” I say, “can you—” I clear my throat. My mouth is dry as a stone. “Can you see the rest of her search history?”
He pauses. “I’d have to hack into her Safari account,” he says.
“After we’ve already hacked into her iPhone,” I say pointedly. “Can you do it?”
Caesar gives me an inscrutable look, then turns back to his laptop and begins typing.
I SPEND THE next half hour reading through Marisa’s search history. I’m splashed all over it. She Googled me the day after we met at the conference and went to bed together. She pulled up my profile on Archer’s website, my social media accounts, that AJC article about the home invasion and shooting. She even found an old Northside Neighbor article about my mother being celebrated for her teaching.
I know everything about you, she told me with a sneer, in my house.
I feel a terrible emptiness, as if all that’s left of me is a scooped-out rind, tossed to the side. And yet somewhere lost in that vast emptiness is a tiny red flame of anger. I can’t grasp it yet, but I know it’s there. For now, I sit in front of the laptop, numbed, my soul glazed over, trying to understand why Marisa did this. She told me she wanted to help me, to get close, to be with me, so I would … what? Love her forever? But it’s more like she wanted to solve me, like I’m a Rubik’s cube. In all her research, did she somehow truly find out who killed my parents? I parse every conversation, every interaction Marisa and I have had, and now in my memory she looks like someone pretending to be a caring person, someone drawn to broken people, to trauma. To people like me. Until I rejected her. And now she wants to ruin me.
When I’m done looking at her Safari history, Caesar pulls up yet another window. It’s Marisa’s calendar app. She has a few items for the past couple of weeks, most of them mundane, like a reminder to pick up her dry cleaning. Then I see one scheduled item at ten AM last Tuesday: J Gardner.
“Mean anything?” Frankie asks.
I look at the name on the screen. Was J the first initial of the first name, or was J the actual name of the man? In the dim recesses of my memory, something shifts, a ghost barely getting my attention before it floats through a wall and vanishes. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.” There’s nothing else listed for last Tuesday in Marisa’s calendar. Then something clicks. “She was out last Tuesday,” I say. “She took Tuesday and Wednesday off, said something about her mother not doing well.”
Caesar clicks, and the screen now shows Wednesday. She has another entry, also at ten AM: S Bridges. That name I recognize—it’s like a tuning fork vibrating in my brain. Now I know who J Gardner is as well.
“What is it?” Frankie asks.
My throat is dry and I try to swallow. “Samuel Bridges,” I say. “He was one of the men who came into our house. He fought with my dad.” In my mind I see that newspaper article Uncle Gavin left on my bed soon after Frankie went to prison, with the pictures of two men who had been arrested for drug trafficking. I look at Frankie. “Bridges went to prison, though. Him and this Jay Gardner guy. My uncle—” I pause. “They got arrested for drugs,” I finish. I’ve never actually confirmed that Uncle Gavin got them both arrested—he’s never openly admitted it, at any rate—and so I’m strangely reluctant to broach the subject. And I don’t want to admit that my uncle found Bridges and Ponytail, that he made an unspoken offer to have them disappear. That I said no. And that when my uncle called in an anonymous tip, Ponytail escaped arrest.
Frankie frowns. “Why does this woman have their names in her calendar?”
“That’s a good fucking question,” I say.
There’s a low chime from Caesar’s phone. He glances at it, then stands up and walks across the room to the garage door. When he pulls it up, he lets in bright sunshine and a shadow-darkened figure. It takes a moment for the shadow to resolve itself as Uncle Gavin, and then Caesar brings the garage door back down with a crash.
“Show me,” Uncle Gavin says, and Caesar walks with him toward me and the laptop. I stand, my legs a bit shaky, and step aside. My uncle doesn’t sit but leans forward, peering at the screen, using the track pad to scroll and to toggle between Marisa’s texts, her tweets, her search history, and her calendar app. I lean against the metal table, arms folded across my chest, exhausted. Frankie stands off to the side, a loyal soldier awaiting orders.
After several minutes Uncle Gavin straightens up from the screen and looks at me. “You’ve read all this,” he says, and I nod. To Caesar he says, “There’s nothing else? No final text from her, nothing about what happened to her?”
I frown. “What do you mean, ‘what happened to her’?”
Uncle Gavin looks swiftly at me. “You don’t know.”
“Know what?”
Uncle Gavin nods to the empty chair. “Sit down.”
“I don’t want to
