by Lexi Archer
Only here was one hell of a bit of evidence right in my face that not only did she have a sex life, but she was stepping out on her husband. All the more surprising since they’d been married for thirty years and seemed pretty damn happy together whenever I saw them at office parties.
Yeah, I was really having a hard time reconciling the sweet lady who always baked the best desserts for office carry-ins and who was always going on about how well her grandkids were doing in school with that sleazy affair website that had been in the news lately.
“Kathy, what the hell are you doing on that site?”
She waved a dismissive hand and grunted something that I didn’t quite catch. She was still staring at the screen intently. At a profile that looked sort of familiar. I squinted and looked closer and then I had my second surprise of the morning. That wasn’t just some random guy she was looking at on the site. That was her husband! The loving smiling grandpa guy who always had a cheesy joke at hand or a funny story about one of the grandkids.
And here he was on that website. Well then. I guess this wasn’t Kathy stepping out on her husband. Quite the reverse, it seemed, but it was no less surprising.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Yup,” she said.
“How are you even able to get on that site at work? I figured they’d have that locked down.”
“Oh this isn’t actually the site,” she said. “Like I’d actually go to that piece of shit. Ever since that hack people have been putting up sites where you can search to see if your husband is on there! Or your wife, I suppose, but it doesn’t seem like there were actually many women on there in the first place.”
I blinked. “Hack? What are you talking about?”
Kathy gave me a look like I was a crazy person. “Have you been living under a rock or something? Didn’t you hear about the big hack?”
“I guess I have been living under a rock because I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
I suppose it would be fair to say I was living under a rock in a metaphorical sense. I usually woke up early enough to go to the gym and I was just listening to music while I was on the treadmill or doing weights. From there I came straight to work after a quick shower and then after work it was home time where the last thing I wanted to do was watch the news. Much more fun to sit and binge watch television and turn off my brain for a little while or maybe have a little bit of fun with Derek before turning in for the night and doing it all over again the next day.
Yeah, the last thing that was on my mind was keeping up with current events. It was enough to try and keep up with my life without worrying about what bullshit politicians were spewing this week or what disaster or war had hit some country I’d probably never heard of outside of a middle school geography class I’d long since forgotten.
“Oh honey,” Kathy said in a tone that made it clear there was more annoyance than sympathy there. “You really haven’t heard? Hackers got all the information from that site and they posted it online for the world to see. Usernames, emails, messages people sent back and forth, pictures, and people have been putting it up online so you can search and see if anyone you know is on there.”
Kathy paused and turned back to the screen. She took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “I guess I decided to check it out as a lark. As a little bit of fun. I never figured that Harold would actually be on there. I never thought that…”
She got a little choked up and didn’t finish whatever it was she was about to say. I wanted to reach out and giver her a hug, try and tell her everything would be all right, but we didn’t have that sort of relationship and it wouldn’t be appropriate for an office setting even if we did. Besides, how could you look at someone with a straight face and tell them everything was going to be all right when they’d just discovered their husband of thirty years was cheating on them?
That wasn’t something that you recovered from easily. I just said a prayer of thanks that everything was going so well with Derek. That I didn’t have to worry about a stunning revelation that had the potential to destroy my whole world like poor Kathy.
Yeah, I really didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. I just backed out of her cubicle, but not before she got in one final bit of advice.
“I’m going to email you this site. Check it out. At least you’re early enough in your marriage that you can get out!”
I sighed. It’s not like I could tell her that I had no intention of checking that site because I was absolutely certain my husband wasn’t interested in cheating on me. I took care of his needs at home, thank you very much, and he didn’t have any need to stray. Only saying something like that to Kathy when she was already upset and dealing with this crap seemed like kicking her when she was down which was the last thing I wanted to do.
So I kept my mouth shut. Everyone else who’d looked up at her outburst was already back down and I figured it would be best to try and get back to work and take my mind off of what just happened with Kathy.
Only it was difficult to do that when the first thing I saw as I sat down in my chair was an email that had a link to the database she’d been looking through. And before I could stop myself I’d clicked on it telling myself that it was more out of curiosity than anything else. Telling myself that there wasn’t a chance Derek was on this site.
Except there was a nagging worry worming its way through the back of my mind. Kathy thought she had a perfect marriage too. They’d been together for almost as long as I’d been alive and they had kids and grandkids together.
To all appearances they had a pretty good marriage too. Of course that was just outward appearances and there was no telling what was going on behind the scenes, but the point was that if it could happen to a couple like that who’d been together forever and had built a life and a family together then who’s to say it couldn’t happen to me when I’d barely been married for a decade and we didn’t even have any kids together?
I still didn’t think there was a chance Derek was on there, but at the same time I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to look. So I glanced at this database that had been done up to look almost exactly like the site in question. A site that I never would have visited in a thousand years because I was damn happy with my husband and my marriage, thank you very much.
Still, I pulled it up and did a search for his name. We had a pretty unique last name so I figured if he was on here he’d come up in a quick search, but thankfully there was nothing there and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I did a search for my name just for fun but again there wasn’t a direct match. Of course there wouldn’t be a direct match since I’d never even visited the site before.
I almost left it at that. Almost. Then I saw there was an option to search by email. Actually as I clicked the dropdown I saw that there was a way to search by pretty much any field that was available in the database including email.
I figured if I wanted peace of mind, if I wanted to make sure that my marriage wasn’t a repeat of Kathy’s apparently failed marriage, it would be a good idea to be thorough.
So I did a search of my work email and then my personal email. Of course nothing came up, not that I was expecting anything to come up. Next I did a search of Derek’s work email and then I used his personal email just to be sure. I smirked as, once again, absolutely nothing came up.
I was on the verge of saying just that to Kathy. She might be having a difficult time, but there was something about the smug way she sent me the link as though she automatically assumed everyone’s husband was going to be on this site that ticked me off. That made me want to prove to her that not every relationship was like that even if she apparently was having a little bit of trouble in her own paradise.
Yeah, I was about to say something when a thought occurred to me. A name I hadn’t thought of in a few years because Derek didn’t play video games all that much anymore, it’s not like he had much time in the years since graduating from college. Still, his gamert
ag was something he used to use everywhere back when he had enough time for video gaming, and I had very vivid memories of nights when I asked him to drop the games so we could go out already and I saw him using that name as he turned and told me “just one more game babe.”
No matter what he was playing he always used that same name, and so I figured it was worth a shot. It was a stupid way to try and hide considering I knew he used the name, but at the same time it didn’t seem like the kind of person who used this website was all that savvy to begin with. Besides, I didn’t think anything was going to come up with this search either. It was all about peace of mind.
At least that’s what I told myself.
So I typed in his old gamertag. Something from some obscure book that he read and loved back when he was a sophomore in high school and then adopted for all of his online activities. Once more I figured nothing would come up, so color me surprised when I actually saw a match for his email.
Okay. That was weird, but it’s possible that other people could’ve read the same weird geeky book and used the same username. Though I was pretty sure he was the only one with that specific name on that email service, but it could be nothing.
I clicked on the profile and was astonished at what I saw. I felt ice running in my veins and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I looked at the profile. The profile definitely wasn’t what I was expecting, and I quickly closed out of it just in case someone walking by got a look and got the wrong idea.
It wasn’t my husband in the profile. Not exactly. What was there could only have been put there by my husband though. He was the only one who had all of that information. The only question is why the hell would he do this to me?
I needed to dig into this. I needed to do more research from the safety of a place where I didn’t have to worry about coworkers walking by and seeing me or the IT people actually getting off their asses and checking logs and realizing what I’d been up to and seeing some things that would’ve been pretty damn embarrassing for me.
I shot a quick email to my supervisor telling her I needed to take a half day for personal reasons. The door was closed but she must’ve been at her computer because she immediately shot a mail back telling me to take all the time I needed.
Yeah, I was going to need a lot of time to gather information and sort out this clusterfuck. I gathered my things and walked past Kathy’s cubicle without a word. I didn’t want her to see the look on my face, and I definitely didn’t want to see the inevitable smug look on her face when she saw the pale shell-shocked look on my face.
I needed to get out of here and get to the bottom of a few things before I confronted Derek when he got home from work. The asshole!
3: Coming Clean
I was immediately on guard when I pulled into the driveway and saw that Ashley’s car was already in the garage. I didn’t remember her having an appointment or anything today that would bring her home early, and I was already feeling a little paranoid after hearing the story of Michaels and his impending divorce at the office earlier.
Yeah, anything out of the ordinary was enough to make me sit up and take notice. Even if it was probably innocent enough.
I was a little annoyed as I moved into the house from the garage. Usually I was the one who got home before Ashley, not the other way around. I’d been hoping to get a little bit of personal time with the computer without her around potentially looking over my shoulder so I could go through and delete as much from my profile as possible.
That wouldn’t exactly help with some of those databases that already had the information out there, I knew that it was probably a futile gesture, but at the same time it had become a singular obsession almost as intense as the obsession that had driven me to create the profile in the first place. By the end of the day I wasn’t able to get any work done because all I could think about was getting home and deleting as much information as possible. From the web, from the computer, all of it.
Best to clean up what I could locally even if I couldn’t do anything about the stuff that was already out there on the web. I wasn’t too worried about that anyways. Ashley wasn’t exactly computer savvy, and I figured as long as I destroyed the local evidence it would reduce the chance of her discovering anything and getting suspicious. Without that I figured she had no reason to go looking in any of those databases anyways, and that was assuming she even knew about the hack considering the current news blackout she usually lived in.
The problem? I couldn’t do any of that if she was actually in the house. Even if I took the laptop to another part of the house instead of the bedroom where I usually did my computing that would just look suspicious. I felt more than a little annoyed that I was going to have to wait. That the paranoia and fear that had been building inside me since I heard about Michaels and his predicament earlier in the day was potentially going to last another day.
Damn it.
“Ashley? Did you have a doctor appointment or something?”
I was met with silence as I stepped into the house from the garage. Now that was odd. Usually she was right there waiting for me with a smile on her face when she got home early. Usually that meant that we were going to have some fun because she didn’t have the stress of a full day at work.
That she wasn’t there with the usual smile on her face set another danger signal off in the back of my head, but I quickly pushed it down. I was acting crazy. There was no way she could’ve found what I was up to. There was no way anyone could track me down.
Still, there was that unsettled feeling settling into the back of my mind and I didn’t like it.
No Ashley in the living room or the kitchen. Nowhere downstairs. As I was making my way up the stairs I heard something that chilled me to the bone. The sound of fingers on a keyboard.
Ashley never used the laptop. Well, she almost never used the laptop. She brought it out to work on bills, but other than that she was strictly a phone kind of girl when it came to using the Internet and social media and all that stuff.
Still I told myself that it wasn’t that out of the ordinary. Maybe she got home early and decided to mess around with the bills early so she could veg out for the rest of the night without feeling bad. Yeah, that had to be it. That was why she hadn’t answered when I called her name. She was so preoccupied with what she was working on that she probably didn’t even hear me. It had happened before.
I stepped into the bedroom with a huge smile on my face that froze in place when I saw her sitting on the bed. There were no envelopes or papers around her that would indicate she’d been working on bills. No, instead she was staring at the laptop screen with an anger and an intensity that made me want to back out of the room, hop back in my car, and drive as far and as fast as possible from the house.
Only it was too late. She looked up at me and she was staring daggers. If my blood and bones were chilled before that look was almost enough to send me to absolute zero and kill me where I stood. If her eyes were guns then I would’ve been a dead man.
And in that moment I realized that in many ways I was a dead man. She knew. She had to know. That was the only explanation for that look. The profile on that site was the only thing I’d done that would warrant her being that angry. Actually she looked like she was somewhere between angry and being on the verge of tears which just made me feel like a huge piece of shit for doing that to my wife.
“Derek,” she said. Her tone was flat. That wasn’t a tone that ever meant anything good was about to happen to me. That was a tone that usually meant I was in deep shit.
“Did you get home from work early or something babe?” I asked. I knew it was probably ridiculous to try and keep up appearances now. There was no doubt in my mind that she knew. Only there was a part of me that couldn’t help but try and ride this out. There was a part of me that was still desperately hoping she didn’t know anything and there was something else going on here.
It didn’t seem very likely, but hope springs eternal and all th
at.
“I decided to take a half day after I got some pretty upsetting information at work,” she said.
I almost breathed a sigh of relief. Almost. Upsetting news at work? Maybe she got fired or she was being demoted. Maybe one of her coworkers got in an accident or something. There were a hundred things that could’ve happened to her at work today that would result in her being upset, and I wasn’t going to give anything away on the off chance that I was wrong in my suspicions about what was really upsetting her.
“Oh? What happened?”
“I found out that Kathy, the lady in the cubicle next to me, found some pretty upsetting information about her husband,” Ashley said.
I started pulling off my tie, though I still didn’t breathe that sigh of relief that was desperately trying to escape. No, I didn’t want to look like there was anything to be relieved about. If something happened to one of her coworkers then that explained why she was upset and I was in the free and clear, but that danger signal was still going off in the back of my mind so I just played along.
“Really? Is he okay?”
“Oh he’s fine if she doesn’t kill him when she gets home tonight. Turns out he had an account on that cheating website, I’m sure you know the one I’m talking about.”
That chill was back. It was amazing how I could go from thinking that I was in the free and clear to realizing that I was in deep shit in a matter of seconds. One sentence and I went from thinking I was still in the middle of a happy marriage to realizing that of course she wasn’t looking that pissed off because of something that happened to one of her coworkers’ husbands. That was crazy wishful thinking.
I licked my lips. My throat suddenly felt dry. I had trouble getting words out. I felt dizzy like I’d been drinking all night long. I felt like I was falling down a deep tunnel and there was no escape.
“Oh yeah?”
It wasn’t much, but it was all I could come up with.
“Yeah, turns out there are all sorts of databases you can search that have all the information from some big hack on them. Did you know about that?”