by Emily Belden
ing all the Post-Its to the wall behind me. I need to see ex-
actly what I’m working with, like a detective working a beat.
As of right now, my algorithm is coded to do two separate
things. During the day, it tracks influencers. At night, my po-
tential relationships. What I need for this particular situation is essentially a combination of both. So I hunker down and
tweak the code to act more like an online yearbook. Some-
thing that can distill Gemma’s pictures, give me a run-down
of her favorite activities, the scope of her friend network—
things like that.
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But in order to feed it, I’ve got to give my program a head
start. I punch her name, Gemma Sutherland, into my search
bar and find her easily enough on social media. I want to drill down on the accounts, but her Instagram profile, the most
visual of them all, is locked. All I can see is her bio: WeHot.
Amateur Blogger. Pro coffee drinker. Mother.
I quickly create a fake Instagram profile for myself under the
pseudo name, @SoCalSweatSesh. To do so, I pull twenty user-
generated photos posted from the event at WeHot the other
day, which helps me pose as a superfan of the boutique gym.
I click the “request to follow” button on @GemmaSutherland’s
profile and hope she’s off the boat and interested in connect-
ing with another “like-minded” wellness guru…or whatever
the hell I’m pretending to be right now.
Meanwhile, I plug in the URL to her blog and hit Go. It
hasn’t been updated in two years and the formatting is abso-
lutely atrocious. I can barely follow the layout and none of the photos are aligned in any sort of methodical way. It’s a coder’s nightmare, but I try to look past the programming issues and
search for more nuggets of truth.
The blog does not turn out to be the gold mine I thought
it would be. She only has five posts and two of them are reci-
pes for cooking Brussels sprouts and the other three include
her training regimen for a 5K, a manifesto on what is hap-
pening to the health insurance system these days, and finally,
an ode to Pinterest. It’s no surprise that she’s as basic as they come, but I know there has to be more. There always has to
be more to a girl who has the balls to sidebar a girl she hardly knows on a captive ship and tell her she had a baby with her
late husband.
That’s when my phone pings with a notification from In-
stagram: @GemmaSutherland has accepted your fol ow request.
And, I’m in.
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Where the blog was lacking in information, the social media
stream more than makes up for it. It’s a treasure trove of pic-
tures, mostly of her—mirror selfies of her six pack and perfect hair. I’m tempted to save a couple to my collection, but then I quickly remind myself that this woman slept with my husband.
Scrolling down, there are a couple images with who I imag-
ine may be her son, but they are all strategically positioned
to retain his privacy. For instance, there is one where he is
hanging upside down on monkey bars, but his back is to the
camera. The caption reads, “When did my monkey become
a middle schooler?!”
Even though I can’t see his face in the pic, I get lost in the
thought that this might be a little version of Decker. I pinch
my fingers on the screen to zoom in on the image. The boy
is wearing a camouflage T-shirt and his jeans are dirty from
playing. He has longish blond hair that’s hanging down like
strings of spaghetti. I can only assume he has a smile on his
face in this moment. Maybe he has Decker’s overbite.
I think back to how old I was in middle school. I do the
math and realize that Decker was probably a sophomore at the
time this kid was conceived—not even old enough to legally
have a drink at the bar or to rent a car.
Between our first date and our five hundredth date, he
never casually—or formally, for that matter—mentioned a
child out of wedlock. While I could understand how some-
one would choose not to lead with that kind of information
upon first getting to know someone, I can’t figure out, if this Gemma thing is true, why he would keep the fact he got a
girl pregnant from me, his partner. His wife. There’s a time
and place for all kinds of honesty once you make that com-
mitment to someone. Decker was a guy who understood that.
I go back to looking through Gemma’s photos. Eventu-
ally in the stream, I spot an image of two Christmas stock-
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Emily Belden
ings hanging from a mantel. The embroidery on the smaller
one says: Aiden. He has a name, I think to myself. A trendy one, at that.
As I go on to recount more of our conversation, I think back
to Gemma alluding to Debbie and Kurt being in the know
about this. So I run what I’ve gathered so far about Gemma
into my algorithm and have it spew out stats regarding a pos-
sible link to Debbie or Kurt Austin. My search comes up
dry. They aren’t friends on Facebook. They don’t follow each
other on Instagram. They aren’t connected on LinkedIn. And
they live worlds apart, according to their respective zip codes.
There is virtually zero connection between them and I find
that to be impossible given how Gemma says they are related.
I drill into Debbie’s profile on my second monitor and comb
through all of her online photos. If she knew she had a grand-
son, rogue or not, she would post it. Maybe she wouldn’t tag
him or drive extra attention to it, but I’m determined to find
some visual wherein this kid is accidentally pictured in the
background of a family dinner.
I dig and I dig and I dig, but I find nothing. As frustrating
as that seems, it’s actually a breath of fresh air. It’s entirely possible, and extremely likely, there is no relationship between
the Austins and Gemma Sutherland, despite what she claims.
Without so much as 1 percent of a link anywhere online, it
serves as further evidence that there is no proof this kid was
fathered by Decker.
So my next step is to go down the rabbit hole one step fur-
ther and attempt to link Gemma to at least one other guy dur-
ing the same time frame who’s a plausible match to be Aiden’s
real dad. For me, it is not enough to just prove Decker isn’t the father. I need to show there’s sufficient evidence for the father being someone else. I need to search for someone who is like
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Decker, but didn’t just suddenly pass away and become an in-
stant pond for this girl to go life-insurance-money fishing in.
I use what I know and recall how Decker was an education
major and a star athlete at USC. There’s no way he’d dabble in hooking up with faculty from some
other department and
then risk getting kicked off the lacrosse team—or worse, out
of USC completely, which also happens to be his father’s alma
matter. It just wouldn’t be something that fell in his moral
scope at all, I don’t care how many Bud Lights were involved
that night at the party.
In fact, I reckon it takes a specific type of person—an im-
mature thrill-seeker; maybe a guy like douchebag Chad—to
have the balls to hook up with his teacher and not use pro-
tection. That’s when I get the idea to create a ranking system, similar to a March Madness basketball bracket, to narrow in
on the real person who fathered this kid.
I go through every photo I can get my eyes on from Gem-
ma’s past feed—from the one where she’s doing a beer bong at a
frat house, to the selfie with her favorite barista, to Thanksgiving Dinner eight years ago—and throw it into my algorithm.
No photographed man is off limits for my data mining—if
he has testicles and was in a photo with her around the time
this child was conceived, he’s the potential father. I even go
so far as to download a facial recognition program so even if
she didn’t tag them in the post, my algorithm will find out
who they are based on similar-looking images on other so-
cial platforms.
An hour later, I’ve found a bottle of wine to keep me com-
pany and my bedroom wall is slathered in fluorescent-colored
Post-Its. But despite its chaotic nature, I’ve narrowed it down to a “Final Four” of sorts and guess what? Decker is not on
there. In no way, shape, or form have my statistics shown any
viable link between her and him—other than the fact he took
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a class she once TA’d called “Intro to Socialism.” But so what?
There must have been a hundred people in that class and not
all of them wound up being accused of fathering a kid. So
that link doesn’t worry me, it’s a dead end.
Like Debbie, Decker and Gemma have no social footprints
to each other. I breeze through his birthday Facebook mes-
sages—the ones I swore I’d never revisit—and see no well
wishes from her. You’d have thought the mother of his child
would have hit his wall with at least an “HBD.”
And frankly, the more I look at her, the more I can’t even
really see him being all that into her, looks-wise. She’s attractive, sure. But she’s way too LA and also the complete oppo-
site of me. I like to think that I’m my own husband’s type,
for fuck’s sake.
As I bring my dirty wineglass back to the kitchen, I check
the clock on the microwave and see that it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning and there’s been no sign of Casey. I can bet that after tonight’s blowout, she won’t be making an appearance at
apartment 518. In fact, I’d say there’s a good chance she found her way back to that guy from speed dating and is banging
him at his dingy apartment right now. Or who knows, maybe
she’s at Justin’s place just trying to stick one to me.
I wish I could pull an all-nighter and drive my investiga-
tion home, but I’m exhausted and Leno needs to be popped
out for a pee before we go to bed for the night. So I take one
last look at my wall before heading outside. Absorbing what
I have done, I can’t help but feel proud. This is me, thriving
under adversity. This is what I wish I could have done in the
hospital.
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20
“Charlotte. It’s 7:00 a.m. I promise you I was going to bring
the urn back before noon,” a groggy-eyed Brian says as he
answers the door in gray sweatpants and no shirt.
“Sorry, I know it’s early,” I acknowledge. “Can I come in?”
Before he has a chance to answer, I roll past him through
the foyer and straight into his living room. I set my bag on his Chesterton sofa like it’s some sort of old habit. In my hand is the stack of sticky notes from my wall. I begin placing them,
in order, on a blank wall below his flat screen. I’ve even sta-
pled the profile pages of a few key people to the correlating
Post-It. Sure, it may look like a police lineup as I press them onto the wall, but I figure in different light, with fresh eyes, there is a better chance I will see the truth.
“What are you doing?” he asks. By now he’s fetched a T-
shirt and a pair of glasses.
“You said you wanted to help me with things, right?” I
don’t make eye contact. I just continue recreating the bracket.
“Yeah, but—”
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“So then help me figure out why my client told me she
slept with Decker and had his baby in college.”
He takes a few steps forward and looks up at the wall.
“What is all this, Charlotte?” Brian asks with the same shock and horror of stumbling upon a gruesome murder scene. “Why
are these names on my wall?”
“It’s a relationship map. A ranking of everyone who that
girl most likely had sex with according to her social media in-
teractions since the start of her various online profiles.”
Brian moves closer, taking better note of my display. He’s
now gazing at it like it’s a piece of art hanging in the Lou-
vre—squinting, tilting his head, contemplating. He peels off
Post-It with the name “Marcus Linton” on it and puts it back.
“Sorry for all the stickies. I found out on the boat last night and I didn’t have any Wi-Fi, so I started scribbling—”
“Why am I not on here?” he asks, pointing to the wall be-
hind him.
“Excuse me?”
“If this is about all of the people who Gemma Sutherland
might have slept with, then why am I not here?”
“Wait. How do you know who Gemma Sutherland is?”
“Her name is right here, Charlotte. Right in the middle
of your…web?” He peels off the bright pink Post-it with her
name and hands it to me as a reminder. “I mean, I know half
these people from USC. Curious why Marcus Linton made
the cut and I didn’t?”
“Are you really asking me this?” It feels like bad timing on
his part, but I can’t help but explain my rationale. “I mean,
besides her TA-ing at the same school you went to, there are
zero links between the two of you. Same for Decker. Hence,
how I know she’s lying about getting pregnant with his child.
Their connection starts and ends with him being a student in
her socialism class. Your connection? Is nonexistent.”
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“That’s interesting, because I did know her.”
I’m sure he means he knew of her and I feel bad that he seems devastated that a cute blonde with big boobs wanted
nothing to do with him back in the college days. It’s times
like this when I especially hate being the bearer of bad news,
but you can’t argue with what the facts show. You ca
n’t argue
with what’s on the wall.
“Come on, Brian. Are you seriously annoyed this chick
wasn’t into you? I know you can get anyone you want, but
you wouldn’t want this one. Seriously. She seems certifiably
insane. If anything, you should be glad I ruled you out.”
“Ruled me out?”
“Yeah, congrats. You’re not in the running to have had a
rogue kid with this crazy, gold-digging woman. I mean, using
her ex-student’s death to prey on his wealthy surviving fam-
ily? Please. I’m not falling for it.”
“I don’t think this is healthy, Charlotte. Why don’t we take
five on the couch? I’ll get some cold brew going. We can work
on a crossword puzzle together.”
A puzzle? I just told Brian someone confronted me about having a secret baby with my dead husband. Now is not the
time to be derailing me with coffee and crosswords.
“Yeah, sure. After we look these people up. Gemma was
in love with someone, but it wasn’t Decker. I need to figure
this out.”
“She was in love with me,” he says, seemingly out of nowhere, gripping the handles of two coffee mugs. “Not Decker
or—” he looks at my wall chart “—whoever the hell Mitch-
ell Heath is.”
“Very funny. Can I have a little cream, please?”
“Look, I clearly wasn’t planning on having this conversa-
tion with you this morning, but you seem adamant,” he says.
“So here’s the truth: I’m the one who backed off on things
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with Gemma. I liked her, but not as much she liked me. So
I sidelined her. Like I did with every girl when I was nine-
teen years old.”
“Did you go out late last night after work? If so, I think you
still might be drunk,” I playfully accuse him.
“Stone sober, actually.” Clearly not in a joking mood. “I
don’t like to drink so soon after losing a patient. It’s a dark habit a lot of doctors fall into.”
“Where’s the urn? I should go,” I say, not feeling like going
tit for tat on whose loss is worse.
“You don’t need to go, Charlotte. I was just trying to—”
“I’m sorry about your patient, Brian. I really am. I of all
people know that death isn’t easy. I know all about the dark habits people—not just doctors, mind you—fall into when you lose someone. But the reality is, tomorrow you get to go back