“Patty, can you take a breath please?” I say. “I’m in the dark here too. Just like you.”
“Your husband aided in a half-a-billion-dollar fraud, so I’m not so sure I believe you,” she says. “But if you’re telling me the truth, you’re the biggest fool in the world, not seeing who your husband really is.”
It doesn’t seem like the greatest time to tell her that, in terms of playing the fool, she isn’t avoiding it either. Her husband has been sleeping with his coworker on and off since Patty was pregnant with the child that Mr. Silly is entertaining in the backyard. Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us—the people we try to love.
“Do you really expect me to believe that you didn’t know what was going on?” she says.
“Why would I be here looking for answers if I did?” I say.
She tilts her head, considers. Perhaps that penetrates, or perhaps she realizes she just doesn’t care. But her face softens.
“Go home to Bailey,” she says. “Just go. She’s going to need you.”
She starts to walk back inside. Then she turns back.
“Oh. And when you speak to Owen? Tell him to go fuck himself.”
With that, she closes the door.
On the walk to my workshop, I move fast.
I keep my eyes down as I turn onto Litho Street and pass LeAnn Sullivan’s house. I clock that she and her husband are sitting on their front porch, drinking their afternoon lemonade. But I pretend to be busy on my phone. I don’t stop the way I normally would to say hello to them. To join them for a glass.
My workshop is in a small craftsman house next door to their home. It is 2,800 square feet with an enormous backyard—the kind of space I only dreamed of having when I was in New York, the kind of space I did dream about in New York every time I had to subway out to my friend’s warehouse in the Bronx to work on pieces that wouldn’t fit into my workshop on Greene Street.
I start to relax as soon as I walk through the front gate, closing it behind myself. But instead of heading inside, I circle around to the backyard and the small deck where I like to do my paperwork. I take a seat at the small table and open Owen’s laptop. I push Grady Bradford out of my mind. I push out Patty’s wrath. And I ignore that Carl wouldn’t even look at me, let alone provide any insight. It centers me, in a way, knowing I have to figure it out myself. And I feel calmer being among my things, my work. Being in my favorite place in Sausalito. It makes it almost feel normal that I’m hacking into my husband’s personal computer.
Owen’s laptop powers up and I key in his first password. Nothing pops out at me as unusual. I click open his PHOTOS folder, which is essentially the Bailey bible. There are hundreds of photographs of her from elementary school and junior high, photographs from each and every birthday starting with her fifth birthday in Sausalito. I’ve seen these all many times. Owen loved narrating the parts of their life that I’d missed: Little Bailey playing in her first soccer game, which she was terrible in; Little Bailey performing in her first school play in second grade (Anything Goes), which she was amazing in.
I don’t find a lot of photographs of them from when Bailey was very little, back when they were still living in Seattle, at least not in the main folder.
So I click on a small subfolder labeled O.M.
This is the folder for Olivia Michaels. Owen’s first wife. Bailey’s mother.
Olivia Michaels née Olivia Nelson: high school biology teacher, synchronized swimmer, Owen’s fellow Princeton alum. There are only a handful of photographs in this folder too—Owen said Olivia hated to be photographed. But the photographs he does have of her are beautiful, probably because she was beautiful. She was tall and lean with long red hair that ran halfway down her back and an intense dimple that made her look permanently sixteen.
We don’t look exactly alike—she was prettier, for starters, more interesting-looking. But, if you swapped out some of the details, it would be fair to say there is a similarity between us. The height, the long hair (mine is blond to her red), maybe even something in her smile. The first time Owen showed me a photograph of her, I commented on the similarity. But Owen said he didn’t see it. He didn’t get defensive, he just said if I actually saw his first wife in person, I wouldn’t think we had much in common.
I wondered if the photographs were also misleading in how little Olivia seemed to resemble Bailey—with the exception of my favorite photograph of Olivia. In that photograph, she is sitting on a pier in a pair of jeans, a white button-down shirt. She has her hand on her cheek and her head is thrown back as she laughs. The coloring is different, but there is something in that smile that may match her kid’s—that I imagine matched Bailey in person. It pulls Olivia in as the missing piece, connecting Bailey to someone besides Owen.
I reach out and touch the screen. I want to ask her what I’m missing about her daughter, about our husband. She would most certainly know better than I do—I know that to be true—which feels like its own kind of injury.
I take a breath in, and click on the folder labeled THE SHOP. It includes fifty-five documents all devoted to code and HTML programs. If there is a code hidden within the actual codes, I certainly won’t find it. I make a note to find someone who can.
Oddly, there is a document in THE SHOP titled MOST RECENT WILL. I don’t like that it
