Fatal Marriage

by Charlotte Byrd

  “So…why?”

  “Because, I want to sleep with you. Is that so wrong?”

  “Sleep with you?” I ask in a barely audible whisper.

  “I’m tired of sleeping alone, Aurora. I’m married. I just want someone there. Someone breathing next to me. Can you understand that?”

  I give him a slight nod. A few loose strands of hair fall into my face as I exhale slowly. I understand that more than he could possibly know.

  I cautiously believe him but keep my guard up. I don’t dare say no. So far, he has been more than gracious and understanding.

  We walk to the master bedroom and my feet make a loud creaking sound on the polished hardwood floors.

  “Do you need anything from your room?” he asks.

  I do, so I stop by and grab my phone along with my eye mask and earphones.

  “Do you sleep with your AirPods in?” Franklin asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  He smiles. “So do I.”

  “I usually sleep naked,” Franklin says, “but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  I’m about to disagree but instead I just thank him.

  “How about you?” he asks.

  “Sweats, kind of like these.”

  He heads to the marble bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. I haven’t done any of that yet but I get into bed anyway. I can only bear to take baby steps with this and going through my whole evening ritual right now, let alone doing that in front of him feels like it would be too personal.

  Franklin doesn’t comment on this. Instead, he just gets into bed next to me and opens this phone. By clicking on the app, the lights dim and my heart skips a beat. Is this when it’s going to happen? Is this when he will turn on me and make his move?

  I open the Kindle app on my phone and stare at the words of the book that I have been reading or rather not reading for the last week. I read the same sentence over and over again but it’s no more comprehensible.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I feel him watching me. My mind starts to race but I don’t dare move.

  “Good night,” he says and shuts off the light above his head.

  The dim light above mine remains. It’s controlled by my phone and I quickly search for the app to turn it off. Somehow, I feel like I will be safer in the dark.

  “You don’t have to go to sleep on my account,” Franklin says. “Feel free to keep reading.”

  “Okay,” I say after a long pause.

  I hear him starting to move and get comfortable. When I glance over, I see him with his face turned away from me, and his arms firmly hugging his pillow.

  “Aurora,” he says, his voice muffled.

  “Yeah?” I whisper, tensing my toes and praying that this isn’t all an elaborate set-up for the sudden attack.

  “Thank you for staying here tonight. It feels really good to have you with me.”

  I don’t respond. My body relaxes and I let out a long sigh of relief but with the next breath, I feel a pang of guilt as well.

  I read for a few hours until I am certain that he is asleep. After that, I wait even more. I listen to his breathing and I hear him falling deeper and deeper into sleep. Finally, around two in the morning, I gather enough courage to slip out of bed.

  I tiptoe over to his office where he left his laptop and pull out the copy of the thumbprint that Jackie dropped off with me. We met at a coffee shop and he slipped it into my purse saying that all I have to do is adhere the thumbprint to my own and press down.

  I don’t know what’s going to happen or even if it will work. I also don’t know what’s going to happen to the laptop if it shows that it has a failed login.

  Will there be a report of these attempts?

  Suddenly, I wonder if this is the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.

  No, it’s not. Marrying Franklin was.

  I adhere the sticker to my thumb and count to three.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Okay, you were supposed to press your thumb print and unlock the computer but I didn’t.

  I simply stay here, frozen in space.

  I take another deep breath.

  And then another.

  All of the courage that you had up until this point is not worth shit if you don’t go through with it, I say to myself.

  Instead of counting again, I just go for it. I press my thumb down and a little circle pops up with an arrow going around in a clockwise motion. A moment later, I’m in.

  26

  Aurora

  Another part of my brain takes over. I search the computer efficiently and without hesitation. I don’t know how much time I have, so I work fast. I don’t bother to look back and I don’t bother to worry about whether or not Franklin is still sleeping. If he catches me here, it’s all over. There’s no way to explain. There are no amends to make.

  Surprisingly, he is such an arrogant bastard, that the files are hidden in a folder that’s called ‘Others.’ There are only two folders on the desktop but it takes me a few minutes to find them.

  The video files are not named but numbered so I start at the beginning. I click on the first one and I see that it’s an ex-president with an underage boy and a girl with the same set-up as before. A massage table is there. They are told what to do. Tears are in their eyes along with far away looks and deadpan expressions.

  I fast forward through it. I’m not here to analyze or watch. I’m here just to transfer it to an external hard drive and take it somewhere else for safekeeping.

  The second video is focused on a man I don’t immediately recognize. I have seen his face on C-SPAN, but I can’t quite place him. The third is a lobbyist for the coal industry. The only reason I know who he is, is because he wrote a pretty famous book denying the effects of climate change.

  I transfer each video without examining the contents carefully. They are on his computer and they’re there for a reason. Franklin is holding onto them as leverage. None of these men want this to come out and none of them know that they are being recorded.

  How many of these men think that their secrets are safe?

  How much would they pay Franklin to never have these videos come out?

  How quickly will they turn on him?

  How likely is Franklin to release them?

  I have no intentions of making myself rich or richer by keeping these people’s secrets. I promise myself here now that every last one of them is going to go down and be exposed for what they have done, along with my husband.

  There is only one disinfectant for a lie and that is sunlight.

  I transfer one video after another to my thumb drive. We have fast internet but this is still a time-consuming process. When I get to the last video, suddenly a thought pops into my head and tilts my world on its axis.

  What if my father is one of these men?

  There’s one video left and I hold my breath when opening it. It never occurred to me before that my father could be one of these people but now it seems like the most obvious thing in the world.

  He’s the CEO and founder of one of the most influential media companies the world has ever seen. Franklin’s little video collection has just about everyone else implicated and what they have done, what if he’s there, too?

  I click on the last video and look for his face but I don’t see him. The suit that is featured is older than him, much fatter and unfamiliar to me. I copy that video over and close the laptop. I sit here for a few moments holding the drive as if it’s the most precious thing I own.

  It is.

  After taking a few moments to celebrate silently in my head, I open the laptop again and go through the files. I need to make sure that whatever is on here, I see. I go through each folder carefully, clicking on and opening files, no matter what it’s called or how it’s labeled. I focus on the ones that are videos and images.

  At the bottom of one folder, beneath files of Excel sheets, I find another video entitled 3112. I click on it and my mouth drop
s open. I watch it once and then I watch it again to be certain if I’m seeing everything right.

  “Could this be it?” I ask myself.

  No, this can’t be true. I’ve seen the real video on the news a million times. They had it in circulation and they showed it over and over again but this video, it’s so different. It has been altered.

  Why would Franklin have a copy of this one but not the other one?

  I sit on the edge of the chair, trying to figure out what is happening. Unlike the other videos that I have downloaded, this one is innocuous enough. There’s no sex in it. No powerful men. You wouldn’t think that there’s anything interesting about it at all except for what it shows.

  This has been a news story for a few months. It’s a video recording of a self-driving car that exploded right in the middle of the intersection. After this video became public, they showed it on the news over and over again, eventually inciting fear in consumers and halting the production of the cars.

  In one frame, the car is driving along the road and another it simply explodes as if someone had rigged it to blow up. No one got hurt, luckily but that didn’t stop all of the talking heads on television from spewing their so-called concerns. The story had caught on and it was like that missing airliner in Malaysia, everyone wanted to know what happened.

  But this video is different.

  It’s not the one they keep showing on the news. It’s the same car at the same intersection and everything about it is exactly the same except that there’s no explosion.

  * * *

  It doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal. One altered video about some self-driving car.

  Who cares, right?

  The thing is that if this video, the one that Franklin has on his computer, is true, then the one that the public has seen is nothing but a fabrication.

  And that’s a very, very big deal.

  I tiptoe back to bed and climb in next to him. I spend the rest of the night in a restless state, unable to sleep.

  I keep tossing and turning over my thoughts that keep returning to one thing. The videos of the sex abuse are terrible and all of those men are going to pay for what they did, but it’s the self-driving car that I keep thinking about. The only way that I can get answers is if I go straight to the source.

  27

  Aurora

  The following morning, Franklin gets up early and heads to work. I wait until he leaves to make an appointment to have lunch with my dad. I wear a suit and show up prepared. I have the video itself isolated and saved onto my phone. He has some explaining to do and the best way that I can get to the truth is to confront him with it.

  As soon as I walk in, my father tells me that he ‘doesn’t have much time.’ He looks frazzled and out of control, like something heavy is weighing on his mind.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. You tell me,” he says, rubbing his temples.

  I wish that he would be relaxed, calm, and at ease, but I guess this will have to do.

  “What’s going on with that husband of yours?” my dad asks.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We had an agreement. We had agreed on a price. We had agreed on a share. We had agreed on…you. It was our only reason why I decided to give him that much. Now, suddenly, he wants to go back on his word.”

  “What is he saying?” I ask, hoping that I can get more information from him than I can get from Franklin.

  “Are you in on this?” Dad asks me straight on.

  I shake my head no and add, “Absolutely not. I don’t really know what’s going on. Tell me.”

  “He’s going back on his word. He wants more. Another fifteen percent. That was not what we discussed.”

  I shrug my shoulders, unsure as to what to say. They have kept me out of all of the negotiations and I am as much in the dark as anyone else.

  “I’m sick of these games, Aurora. You better talk to him.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” I say. “He won’t tell me anything and you never did. Do you want my help? If so, then you need to fill me in.”

  Dad looks at me, narrowing his eyes. He breathes heavily and his nostrils flare from anger.

  “I have something that I wanna show you,” I say. “I want you to tell me what it means.”

  “I don’t have time for this, Aurora.”

  “Yes, you do,” I say as calmly as possible.

  I take out my phone and click on the video app then I play him the doctored video.

  He doesn’t look away and watches the whole thing. I, on the other hand, watch his face turn pale and all blood drain out of it.

  “Everyone in the world saw that self-driving car blow up and nearly kill someone. It was played over and over and all the primetime shows and discussed it ad nauseam on all the daytime ones.”

  “I have no idea what this is,” he says, after some of the shock wears off.

  I shake my head no and say, “Yes, you do.”

  He gets up from behind the oak table and paces in front of me. He walks back-and-forth and then back-and-forth again.

  Slowly, deliberately.

  I see him thinking. I know him well enough to realize that I’m onto something. He knew about this video but why?

  “What does this mean?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “That video you ran on all of your networks is fake,” I say. “You know it.”

  Again, he doesn’t respond.

  “You’re not going to explain yourself?” I ask.

  “I don’t owe you an explanation,” my father responds.

  There’s that anger that I have been searching for. Now all of my suspicions are confirmed. He knew that he was running a fake video. He knew it all along.

  “You made that video legitimate by running it on the network and having all of the pundits talk about it all the time. People are afraid of self-driving cars now because it spoke to their darkest fears. About technology taking over everything and about technology making all of us obsolete.”

  “So what?” Dad asks.

  “Why? Why did you do this?”

  “Why else, Aurora? Why else would someone like me do anything like that?” He’s challenging me the way that he used to when I was a kid. Asking me the same questions back so that I will think up my own explanation.

  This time, however, I don’t have an answer.

  “The company, we’re going under. Franklin is our only hope. It was the only way that I was going to stave off bankruptcy. Before Franklin was an option, before I knew whether you would agree to marry him and all of his demands would be met, I had to make a contingency plan.”

  He stops talking. He walks over to the glass bar and pours himself a glass of whiskey. He does not offer me a drink.

  “I was strapped for cash,” he says, sitting down across from me in the chair in front of his desk. It swivels and he turns to face me.

  Now, we are face-to-face. He doesn’t sit back, instead he leans forward. He focuses all of his attention on me, and his eyes plead for my forgiveness.

  “I borrowed a lot of money from the pension fund,” Dad says.

  “Borrowed?” I correct him.

  “Okay, stole. I wanted to put it back but it just didn’t turn out that way. We just kept hemorrhaging money and there was nothing I could do.”

  “What happened?”

  “I took a bribe. A pretty big one but it was the only way that I could hold off going bankrupt and losing everything.”

  “What was the purpose of that video?” I ask.

  “There’s a short seller involved. I had to approve the release of the fake video of the test and of the self-driving car blowing up.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “The short seller had put in the short position on that company’s stock. After the video came out, PR5, the company that created the self-driving car, their stock started to fall. The longer that video circulated and the more attention it g
ot especially on primetime, the harder that stock fell. The short seller, he made millions. Probably even a billion.”

  I shake my head, not wanting to believe what I just heard.

  “PR5 was the kind of company that no one thought could ever go under. It was valued so incredibly high and no one thought that anything would happen.”

  “Well, nothing did. That video is a fake.”

  “I know but I had to do it.”

  “How much money did you get from it?”

  “A lot,” he says.

  “I need a specific number.”

  “At least 400 million, maybe 500. It’s still not all in our accounts but it will be.”

  “So, you’re laundering the money on top of that fraud?” I ask.

  “Of course, how else do you expect it to come back into our coffers?”

  “So, what now?” I ask.

  Dad shrugs his shoulders and takes another sip of his whiskey.

  “That was major fraud, you know that, right?”

  He tilts his head and looks up at me with his big blue eyes. Those were the same eyes that I used to love as a little girl. I grew up adoring him. He could never do anything wrong. He was smart, powerful, and funny. He had every attribute that someone would want to be described as. That was what he was to me when I was a child, but I got older and things changed. Then reality set in.

  Perhaps that happens with everyone but mine was particularly small. I realized that he may have told me that he loved me on more than one occasion, probably a lot more than most dads told their children but whether or not he actually did love me, I didn’t know for sure. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe he did love me in his own way. In his own selfish, narcissistic, self-centered, and completely egotistical way.

  “There’s something else, Aurora,” Dad says.

  “What?”

  “The short seller I told you about, Daniel Kavinsky, he threatened my life if this thing with you and Franklin falls apart.”

  I shake my head no. So, that’s it. That’s who had threatened to kill him. My mom wasn’t lying. She just didn’t tell me all of the details.