The Marriage Lie

by Kimberly Belle

  “I’m looking for Zeke. He’s expecting me.”

  She points to a bright yellow door to my right. “Seek and ye shall find.”

  I thank her and head into the back, which is little more than a long hallway lined with storage spaces barely large enough to be called rooms. I pick my way down it, peeking into each one, finding stacks of unmarked boxes and plenty of empty take-out containers but no humans.

  The last room on the left is jammed with computer parts—consoles and memory boards and semi-assembled laptops. A snake’s nest of Ethernet wires and power strips spill across the floor, leading to a stainless-steel table with, behind it, a man who looks more like a surfer dude than a techie. Shaggy hair, half-mast eyes, worn T-shirt over baggy shorts, leather and beads slung around his neck. But he’s pounding away at a keyboard, so I assume I’m in the right place.

  I knock on the doorjamb, and...nothing. I try again, this time harder, and clear my throat. “Hello, Zeke?”

  He glances up, but barely. “Depends.”

  “Evan Sheffield sent me over. I’m Iris Griffith. He said you could help me with my phone.”

  Without looking away from his screen, Zeke holds out a palm, and I’m already shaking it when I realize the gesture wasn’t meant as a greeting. “Your phone,” he says, his tone impatient.

  Okay, then. I slide it out of my bag and fork it over.

  He attaches it to his computer with a cord and goes to work without another word. His fingers fly across the keyboard, and a wave of nostalgia sucker punches me, slamming me with how much I miss Will. The rapid-fire clicking of the keys, the long strings of symbols and numbers rolling across the screen... I sink onto the edge of a chair against the wall.

  “Somebody at Best Buy told me the number came from an app, which made it untraceable.”

  Zeke snorts. “And you believed him?”

  I bite down on an obviously. “Do you think you can trace it?”

  “In, like, five minutes, tops.” A new text pings my phone, and he glances at the screen. “Dude’s persistent, I’ll give him that.”

  I chew my lip and gaze around the room, reading senseless scribbles on a wall whiteboard, taking in the tangles of wires and chargers in a crate on the floor, trying hard to look at anything but my phone. Still. I hear my own voice say, “How many texts are there?”

  Zeke stops typing. “Eighty-three.”

  “Do me a favor, will you? Read me the last one.”

  He gives me a strange look but swipes a finger across my iPhone screen. “It says If I could go back and start all over again, I’d do everything different but you.”

  A sob tries to elbow its way up my throat, and I swallow it down, concentrating on my anger instead. Will is not dead. He’s gone by choice. He chose money over me, his supposed very favorite person on the planet. Even if he could go back, even if we could start all over again, would I want to?

  But even through the anger mowing away at my insides like a swarm of hungry termites, I know the answer is yes. I shouldn’t, but I do, because I think maybe I can change things. Maybe I can make him choose me next time, instead of the money. There’s a sucker born every minute out of heartache.

  After a few more minutes of ticking away at his keyboard, Zeke looks away from his monitor and to me. “There are, like, thousands of ways to stay anonymous online these days, and this dude used a flawed one.” He scribbles something onto a pad, rips off the sheet and hands it to me, along with my phone. An Atlanta address I don’t recognize.

  “Seriously? That took you what, all of four minutes?”

  For the first time since I walked through his door, Zeke grins, his teeth blinding me in the blue-tinted light. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

  * * *

  The house is a multi-gabled monstrosity of brick and stone in Vinings, a suburb just outside the northwest perimeter of the city. There are a million houses like it here, in a million neighborhoods just like this one—newly built communities where everything matches. Carefully clipped lawns lined with winding beds of rhododendrons. Twin lanterns on either side of the front door and at least one bay window. Decorative shutters and stout mortar mailboxes down at the curb.

  I putter past in my car, checking for signs of life, but as far as I can tell, there are none. The indoor lights are off, but it’s also barely dinnertime on a sunny spring day, so why wouldn’t they be? There’s also no sign of movement, no shadows sliding across the windows. If Will is in there, he’s somewhere I can’t see him.

  Still. Will hiding out in this house doesn’t make any sense. If he’s got the money, why stop running in an Atlanta suburb? Why not disappear across the border, or at least into the mountains of a neighboring state? Will is too smart, and Vinings is too close to home.

  I park around the corner, slip my phone in my skirt pocket and pick my way across a neighbor’s backyard on my tiptoes, trying not to sink my heels into their flawless fescue. The landscaping is as young as the house, a few years at best. What trees have been planted are still spindly and bare, providing zero coverage.

  I have lost my freaking mind. An open target in broad daylight. The worst Peeping Tom in the history of Peeping Toms—in a skirt and heels, no less.

  I come up to the kitchen window and press my nose to the glass. On the other side, a chair is pushed back from the table before an open laptop, its screen dark, next to a plain white mug. This morning’s coffee or a late-afternoon cup of tea? There’s no telling. Beyond, the kitchen is dark and empty.

  I slink around the corner to the back door. A pair of muddy sneakers—men’s—lie abandoned next to a pile of newspapers. Whoever lives here runs and recycles, and I add two ticks to the Not Will column. Will prefers the gym, and he reads his news online. I shove my way through the shrubs and move on to the next window.

  The living room is empty, too, its contents too generic to make any assumptions about the person who lives here. A couch, two chairs, a couple of tables and lamps. I look around for anything personal, photographs or books or discarded items of clothing, but there’s nothing. Other than the shoes and the laptop, this place could be a model home.

  A light flips on in the hall, and my heart stops, then kicks into high gear. If it’s Will, what will I do? Faint into the bushes? Bust through the window? I grip the sill, hold my breath and wait.

  Disappointment balloons in my belly, hard and heavy, at the man who walks around the corner. It’s not Will, but I recognize him immediately. Tall build and broad shoulders, skin the color of coffee beans. I saw plenty of that skin just yesterday, when he was pushing a lawn mower across my backyard.

  I move the pieces in my brain, sliding them around to find where they fit. The house. Will. Corban. If this is the address attached to the blocked number, the one Will’s been using to text since he traced me to Seattle, what is Corban doing here? And where’s Will? No matter how I try to shove them together, I can’t make the pieces connect.

  Corban moves farther into the room, and I slide down to the next window, tracking his movements. He’s hunched over a cell phone, his thumb swiping at the screen. Whatever he sees there freezes his shoes to the hardwoods, and a frown pushes down on his forehead.

  Something inside me goes on high alert, like Ava’s fancy sports car that beeps whenever her back bumper gets too close to something solid. The alarm in my head is screaming, telling me I’m backing up to something dangerous. A ravine, maybe, or the edge of a cliff.

  Without warning, his head swings up, his gaze whipping to the window.

  My window.

  As if he knew exactly where to look.

  I drop to the dirt, holding my breath and listening for a sign, but I can barely hear above my pounding heart. Did he see me? Is he on his way outside right now? I don’t wait to find out. I dig my limbs into the dirt and start scrambling, my h
eart lodged behind my teeth. Pine straw pricks my hands and skin, and cloth rips in the brambles—my skirt or my blouse or both—but I don’t stop. I duck my head and keep going. Twenty feet through the bushes to the end of the house, and then what? As soon as I hit the yard, I’ll be seen.

  It’s either that or pray he doesn’t come outside.

  A door slams, a dog barks, and that’s all I need to know. I burst from the branches, lunge into a sprint and tear across the yard for the car.

  I tumble onto my driver’s seat and stab my keys in the ignition with shaky, dirt-caked fingers. I chance a peek up the yard as I’m peeling away, and there’s Corban standing in the doorway, one hand shading his eyes from the sun.

  And smiling.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, I swerve my car between two SUVs in a nearby Home Depot lot and try not to hyperventilate. I’m no longer winded from my sprint across Corban’s yard, but my breath still comes in short spurts, and the air feels stuck in my lungs. I puff my cheeks and hold my breath like Corban taught me at the memorial—oh, the irony—and it helps. When I release it, my lungs unknot somewhat.

  Corban saw me. Not only did he see me, he could have easily caught up with me. I’m not an athlete, and high heels and a pencil skirt aren’t exactly the best gear for a hundred-meter dash. In the time it took me to make it across his yard and into my car, a jock like Corban could have lapped me, twice.

  But he didn’t even try.

  He also didn’t look surprised. And he was smiling.

  My cell stabs me in the pubic bone, and I dig it from my skirt pocket. I stare at the dark screen, and I recall an information evening Ted and I held for parents a few months ago. The subject was cyberbullying, and we were barely a half hour in when the meeting was hijacked by a couple of helicopter parents who had, unbeknownst to their kids, installed GPS trackers on their teenagers’ cell phones. They told us this proudly, as if spying on their kids was a God-given parental right, and I made the mistake of wondering out loud if that was crossing some sort of line. Ted spent the rest of the evening trying to calm everyone down.

  But the point is, I know the technology exists.

  The trackers these parents talked about were invisible, working undetected in the background. All you have to do is get a hold of the other person’s phone long enough to install it, and bingo, you know where they are at all times. The realization rises slowly, repellently, to the surface of my mind, and if it weren’t for all those texts from Will, I’d chuck my phone out the window.

  And then another realization tightens the breath in my lungs.

  The blocked number led me to Corban, not Will.

  With shaking fingers, I wake up my phone and scroll through the texts—a whopping eighty-seven in all.

  Heartfelt apologies. Detailed explanations and tearful regrets. He says everything right, except for one.

  Seventeen times, he tells me he loves me. But not once does he say the words I want to hear. Our words. Not once does he tell me I’m his very favorite person, which means the person on the other end of this number also isn’t mine.

  Which means...what? Will is dead? As furious as I am at the idea he’d choose money over me, I don’t want to believe it. What about the notes, the ones apologizing and warning me to stop snooping into his past? If Corban is behind the texts, is he behind the notes, too?

  I slump my shoulder against the window, the day crashing over me all over again in a sickening wave. I feel it coming. The familiar little tickle in my lungs, a burning at the edges of my eyes, that tightening deep in my throat. All signals I’m on the knife-edge of an impending meltdown.

  When the notes and the texts began, I chose to believe Will was on the other end. I needed to believe it. When faced with the reality of a plane and a charred cornfield, I chose to look the other way, just like I did in our marriage. So Will didn’t like to talk about his past. So there were some holes in his stories. Whenever an incongruity would arise, I convinced myself it was a silly mistake, told myself to overlook it. What mattered, I always thought, was our present.

  Only, how can you love a person you don’t really know?

  The answer breeds and multiplies in my gut, chomping away at the grief, eating it whole and belching it back up in a spiky ball of anger—not just at Will’s betrayal but more at myself for falling for it.

  Love and sacrifice. Honesty. Trust. We see what we want to see. We gather information, use it or ignore it to shape our own beliefs, to make our own choices, to withhold love or to give it freely.

  I toss the phone onto the passenger’s seat and shove my car into gear, pointing it back toward the highway.

  My husband is dead.

  My heart is broken.

  My eyes are wide-open now.

  * * *

  Despite rush-hour traffic, I make it back to Little Five Points in under an hour. By now it’s closing in on seven, and the sky has faded to a pinkish purple.

  Inside, the record store is empty, save for the pretty girl behind the counter. She’s counting out money and, when she hears the bell jangle on the door, holds up a finger. I don’t wait, shoving through the bright yellow door before she can look up from her pile.

  I find Zeke exactly where I left him, still clacking away on his keyboard in the cluttered back room.

  “You’re back,” he says without looking away from his monitor.

  I drop my cell onto his desk. “You missed the tracker.”

  “No, I saw it.” He looks up, then rears his head back at my tousled hair and disheveled blouse, my right sleeve ripped in two places. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “The tracker happened to me. It would have been helpful if you’d told me it was there.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  I can’t swallow the sigh that sneaks up my throat. “Can you take it off now, please? And I have another number I need you to trace. It’s the 678 number at the top of my text app.”

  Zeke swipes a finger over the screen, pulls up the messages. There have been four more since the first two, sinister texts promising pain and death if I don’t cough up the money. “That’s seriously messed up.”

  “Tell me about it. I was hoping you could tell me who sent them.”

  “This dude routed the messages through a company site, too, but—” He taps a couple of buttons on the phone and frowns. “Huh. That’s weird. Hang on, this may take me a minute.”

  “While you’re at it, is there anything else suspicious or sneaky on there I should know about?”

  He digs a charger out of the crate by his feet and holds it out to me. “Throw all your other chargers away, or better yet, bring ’em to me. I’m always in the market for sniffers.”

  I don’t know what a sniffer is, but I drop the charger in my bag anyway.

  He returns to my phone, swiping a finger across the screen. “How tight you need this thing to be?”

  “Pretend it’s your girlfriend’s phone.”

  His eyes gleam, and he gestures to the chair behind me. “Have a seat. You’re gonna be here awhile.”

  27

  Over the ravioli special at Cafe Intermezzo in Midtown, I fill Evan in on the latest developments. How Zeke traced the phone to a house in Vinings where I found Corban Hayes. How I then hightailed it back to Zeke, who took the tracker off my phone as well as an app that was logging my call and text history. How when I left he was still working his magic on the 678 number, the one that sent the two threats.

  “For some reason, it’s harder than the other one to trace. Zeke promised to call as soon as he cracked it.”

  Evan is still in his work suit, an immaculate pinstripe that has to have been custom-made for his extra-long frame, but his jacket is draped over the back of his chair, his collar is loosened, and his sleeves are shoved
up his long arms. Together with his mountain-man beard, the effect would be ruggedly charming if it weren’t for his eyes, drooping with sorrow at the edges.

  “But this other number,” he says, reaching a long arm over the table to hand me back my phone, “the blocked one you thought was Will, Zeke traced it to Corban Hayes?”

  “No. Zeke traced it to the address of a McMansion in Vinings. But when I looked through the back window, Corban Hayes was who I saw.”

  Evan’s brows blow skyward. “You looked through the back window? Have you gone completely insane?”

  “Funny you should ask that, because yes. I have gone insane. Either that, or I’m being haunted by my dead husband. Take your pick.”

  He plunks both forearms on the table and leans in, hard enough the table wobbles under his weight. “This is not a joke, Iris. If this guy is sending you messages pretending to be your dead husband, there’s something bigger going on. You don’t want to be anywhere near him, and you definitely don’t want to be standing in his own backyard. What if he’d seen you?”

  “He did see me.”

  Evan sits there, his face blank like he’s waiting for the punch line.

  “Corban saw me. First through the window, and then again when I tore across his yard. It’s why I’m such a mess. I got stuck in his bushes.” I stick a finger through one of the holes on my sleeve, find a raised scratch across my skin. “Anyway, he didn’t chase me. He just stood there and watched me drive away. And here’s the creepy part—he was smiling.”

  “You think the smile is the creepy part.”

  Normally, I’d laugh at Evan’s deadpan expression or the massive understatement or both, but considering the context, I don’t find it the least bit funny. Besides, Evan’s got a point. Corban’s smile was not the only creepy part.

  Evan picks up his fork, stabs a ravioli cushion, then drops both to his plate with a clatter. “I don’t like it. This guy is pretending to be Will, which means he’s devious and dangerous, and he knows too much.” Evan shakes his head, picks up his fork. “I don’t know what his motives are, but he’s a threat. You can’t go home. You’re not safe there.”