by Nina Laurin
It’s Monday morning, and we’re having breakfast together at the kitchen counter, like before. Miracle of miracles. But I’m too out of it to appreciate it. Or to appreciate the story of the poor doxed receptionist who got swamped with calls asking for sex over the weekend before finding a fake escort ad with her address and phone number in it. They took her picture from her Facebook profile. She had to go stay at a friend’s because she feared for her safety.
“What a time to be alive,” I say mechanically, ready to be mocked by him for such stock platitudes. But he barely takes notice that I’ve spoken, already absorbed in another article on his iPad.
I try to remember what it is I had to do today. I think I had a busy, packed calendar but my mind draws a complete blank. It all feels like part of some other universe, one I am locked out of and have lost the key to. My goals seem so far away and about as realistic as climbing Everest in high heels.
Someone is trying to get rid of me.
There’s someone else, another woman. Colleen? No, that’s crazy. Although to be honest, nothing is too crazy after this past weekend.
But someone is trying to replace me, the same way I replaced Colleen.
I saw her. I heard her. She was real.
When the door closes behind Byron, I sit at the kitchen counter, alone, for twenty-three minutes and thirty-one seconds, according to the clock. I glance at my phone, which is lying facedown on the counter within arm’s reach.
Did you like drowning, Claire?
Reluctant, I pick it up. But there are no strange messages, no weird emails. And the incriminating one vanished overnight—it doesn’t even surprise me this time.
Well, whoever this woman is, she will find out that Claire Westcott will not give up without a fight. I get up, head straight for Byron’s office door, and tug on the door handle.
It’s locked, which is something he started doing recently and thinks I haven’t noticed because I never brought it up. Luckily for me, he hasn’t figured out that I found the key. It’s in the living room, in an ornate box stashed on one of the shelves. The box is a trophy from some fancy trip he took with Colleen a long time ago, and it contains a litany of small objects that didn’t have their place elsewhere: lonely buttons, random coins, a sole earring, a stray cuff link. Also, a nondescript key that, after trying it all over the house, I figured out opens the office door.
Of course, ever since he started locking the door, he takes the key with him to work. But way back when I first found it, the first thing I did was make a copy, just in case. Despite what Byron might think of me, I always think of the future.
The lock is well-oiled, and the office door creaks quietly as I slip in. The term man cave comes to mind when I look at Byron’s office: with walls densely covered with books, black-and-white photo prints framed on the desk, and his computer. Not the sleek little laptop he takes with him everywhere, but the desktop, a heavy and somewhat outdated beast that he won’t replace with something more practical because he’s just so used to it.
Usually, a man’s private computer is his territory. Any woman knows better than to snoop in it because she won’t like what she finds. But I’m not put off. I know that Byron, like any man, watches porn semiregularly. I know what kind, and frankly, it could be a lot worse. I never understood women who got their panties in a twist about porn. If anything, it’s a harmless way to let off steam. As for my husband, he doesn’t even have a favorite video—whatever random thing that’s free and available seems to get the job done.
But that’s not what I’m here for.
I turn on the monitor, and the welcome screen comes on. My first unpleasant surprise is that his password has been changed. It used to be our wedding date, which I found kind of sweet when I figured it out. But now I enter it only to be met with an error message.
I frown, my hands hovering over the keyboard, ready to enter something else. No. I need to think about it. I don’t know how many attempts I have before the system locks me out. I try Colleen. Nothing.
I’m not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed. Drumming my fingertips on the desk, I think. Colleen plus her birthday doesn’t work either.
Holding my breath, I enter COLLEEN04112010.
I hit Enter, and my breath escapes from me in a rush when the screen blinks and the desktop appears.
Her death date.
Facing the desktop with its image of a Bali beach and its rows of icons, I chew my bottom lip. Finally, I decide to start at the beginning. His email is already open, one of the many open windows and even more numerous open tabs. Hello, [email protected]! I don’t even have to sign in.
Squinting at the too-bright screen, I scroll through generic messages from the college, emails from Emily and Andrew, and Amazon receipts for books he bought.
I’m ready to give up when a message catches my eye. It’s one of those automatic emails. Your booking has been confirmed!
I glance at the date. Two months ago. An unpleasant tremor travels up my spine, and I click on the email. It opens, and I find myself looking at a familiar picture: an image of the cabin. It’s a pretty, promotional photo taken on a bright autumn day, and it looks like a postcard, idyllic and welcoming. The cabin looks much nicer than it actually is.
Your booking for 09/21-09/23 is confirmed, I read. Below is the address of the property as well as the conditions. Please remember that, in case of cancellation, a percentage of the cost will be charged to—
I stop reading. There’s no need to continue.
So the last-minute getaway idea wasn’t exactly that. I remember his sheepish look as he apologized for the shabbiness of the surroundings. It was hard to find anything better. Right.
This was planned. Yet I feel no anger, no betrayal, not even hurt. I’m just numb. And just like that, it occurs to me: Maybe it was planned. Just not for him and me. For him and…someone else?
Then things went sideways, and he decided to take me instead.
Guided by an unknown intuition, I click on the icon at the top of the screen. A drop-down menu unfolds, containing only one item: [email protected], reads the address, next to a blank user icon.
My heart begins to pound, fast and dull, as I click and open it in yet another tab.
I’m greeted with a nearly empty screen; [email protected] only has a single message in it—a single thread, it turns out on closer inspection. Without letting myself think or second-guess, I click.
The latest message in the thread unfolds.
I don’t know what else to do. I can’t take much more of this. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with her? To have to fall asleep next to her every night? I don’t know if she suspects something—by now, she very well might. But to be honest, I don’t care. Some days, like this weekend, I think, fuck it, I can just leave. Cut my losses, as awful as it must sound. Hell, she can have the house. She can have all my savings, I just don’t want to be around her for another minute. But, as you know, M., it’s not nearly that easy…
Yours,
B.
My body reacts before my mind can wrap itself around what I just read. My eyes film over with tears, and pain squeezes my throat, so sharp it takes my breath away.
Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I blink away the tears and scroll up.
You have to be patient, B. I know it’s going to take a lot of patience, and a lot of work, but we have to do this right or who knows what might happen? It’s the only way. You know I’ll be there to help you with everything I can. You can count on me.
M.
M. My mind reels back to the Facebook discussion. What was the name of that girl? The grad student the others were gossiping about. Maya? Mila?
Mia.
I remember without having to look. It’s Mia, the girl who gave me the dirty look over the edge of her heavy tome when I came to the college that day.
Scroll up.
I can’t even look at her anymore, M. Some days I used to watch her flit
around the house and wonder if this is all a mistake and whether I can turn back, start over. You must forgive me for such weakness. I know there can be no starting over and no uncertainty. I have to get rid of her. I just don’t know how.
And the reply:
You have to tread extremely carefully here, B. With what happened to Colleen and the others, the situation is precarious. I won’t lie, it looks bad. With that history—and that history will come floating up first thing should anything happen to her—the police will jump down your throat. You should have been more careful from the beginning.
The answer, time-stamped a couple of hours later:
Don’t you think I know that? I realize it fully; I’m in deep shit. But imagine yourself in my shoes. I have to come home to her every day, eat the dinner she makes me, sip the drink she pours for me. Playing the perfect woman, the perfect wife. How could I have been naïve enough to fall for that?
Reply, within minutes:
It’s not your fault. Any man would have. Be careful with yourself, B. Be careful what you do. Love you.
M.
I can’t read any more. I lick my dry lips and then click the window closed.
Mia. Mia Mia Mia.
I get up with a clatter of the chair. A familiar feeling pulses through my veins, bringing me back to the real world—back to life.
No way am I going to take this lying down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I park the car in the small lot behind the literature building, where I know Byron won’t see me because he parks in the bigger lot out front. But I can see the entrance just fine from where I’m sitting. I have time. And I have patience.
Mia Mia Mia Mia. He’s replacing me. Replacing me with a grad student! She’s probably not even younger than I. She’s definitely not prettier. If she were, would it be less bad? I don’t know. It would make more sense.
In the back of my mind, I’m still wondering, guiltily, what I did to cause this. Because surely, I must have done something. It’s my fault—I taught him to always expect the best; I got him accustomed to having his every wish and whim and expectation met and exceeded. Making fancy meals, picking out good wine, maintaining charming conversation with his work friends, wearing beautiful dresses and looking good on his arm at college events. And now he got bored, and what he wants is something new.
No, no. It doesn’t make sense. Why her? That awful hair, the hipster sweater she had on that time. The lip ring. He’s not someone who goes for a girl with a lip ring. She’s vulgar, mundane. She’s so—
In that moment, I see Mia exit the building, her bag slung over her shoulder, and the realization hits me. Despair fills my lungs slowly, drowning me from the inside. Now I see all the other things she is, plain as day. She has a slight figure, her breasts nonetheless prominent enough even under the baggy sweater—propped up by a good bra, no doubt. Plain black leggings hug skinny legs topped with an inexplicably round ass. She only looks stumpy because she wears ballet flats that threaten to fall apart with every step—the sole of the right one is coming unglued. She squints in the sun. I can see now that the weird bob haircut emphasizes her long, fragile neck—I could wrap my hands around it and squeeze squeeze squeeze until there was no breath left inside her, those full lips bloodless and blue, those big brown eyes filmed over, shocked and still. The too-short bangs bring out her high cheekbones and highlight full brows. And that dull hair color I made a mental note of last time lights up in the sun. It’s a natural dark blond, like ancient gold. As she hefts her bag into the trunk of her car, a battered Ford, her sweater rides up, and I get a flash of a pancake-flat stomach with a glinting ring in the navel.
I’d looked Mia up on Facebook. Just before leaving, I sent her a friend request from my dummy account, which she accepted immediately. Her profile is weirdly minimal. Her profile picture is that of a cat—I’m assuming hers. She only reposts stuff about politics and books, not a single original status in the whole feed. Instead of discouraging me, this lack of insight spurred me on. I didn’t even put on makeup before I left the house, and I’m a fright, my hair tied back with a headband instead of a proper elastic tie.
But if I do everything right, she won’t see me.
I know the thing to do is to follow at a respectable distance but I’m jittery, my hands tight on the steering wheel and my foot jumpy on the gas pedal. Driven by the panicked thoughts of her making a turn ahead of me and vanishing into the thin early afternoon traffic, I take risks. Dumb risks. I cut off another driver, switch lanes when I shouldn’t. Someone rolls down their window just to throw a few choice words in my direction, words that, today, seem to burn into my skin like molten metal. My eyes fill with tears that I have to blink away.
Get hold of yourself, I mutter under my breath. I’m drawing attention. Not Mia’s, not yet, but Mia isn’t the only one I must worry about. Actually, Mia is at the bottom of the list. I should be worrying about anyone who might be motivated to remember my car, my license plate. I should worry about getting pulled over and slapped with a ticket—the kind of ironclad proof that always comes back to bite you.
I’ve never been like that. I’ve always had an eye for detail. Did the last two years make me this soft and stupid?
I fall back behind a line of cars waiting at a traffic light, three or four behind Mia’s little Ford. Her hand is hanging out of the car window, casually holding a cigarette. A smoker. Did I ever smell smoke on Byron when he came home from work?
I can’t remember.
The point is, I try to tell myself, she has no idea she’s being followed.
Luckily, this doesn’t go on for much longer. She lives in a duplex on the edge of the student ghetto—the place where “fully furnished off-campus suites” rent for fifteen hundred dollars a month. In reality, these “suites” are crammed into century-old buildings with oppressively low ceilings and small windows, where formerly working-class apartments have been further subdivided to create studios the size of a closet.
Engine idling, I watch Mia park and then grab her bag and saunter up the stairs to the double doors of her building. These doors were once ornate but the paint has peeled and one of the glass panels has been replaced with cardboard. She shoves the door unceremoniously with her foot and goes in, letting it swing closed behind her. It doesn’t shut all the way, leaving a gap a few inches wide.
I stop the engine and get out of the car. Now what?
I could call and figure out a way to get her out of her apartment—if only I’d done my homework. But I don’t have her number. I think of all the occasions I’d had, over the last two years, to snoop in Byron’s office and get the info on everyone he comes into contact with, and groan at the missed opportunity. Maybe I did get soft and stupid.
But no sooner do I get back into my car than fate smiles on me. Mia is leaving. She’s had time to change into one of those baggy dresses and into a different pair of flats, this one not in quite such a state of disrepair. She’s firing off texts as she hops down the stairs, never looking up from her phone, smiling at the screen. She’s put on lipstick, I notice. The lipstick is garish orange, and for a moment, I think I must be insane. There has to be some mistake. She can’t possibly be the other woman. Byron would never trade me for this.
But then I think about Colleen. If Colleen were alive today and a couple of decades younger, that’s exactly how she would dress. Ugly on purpose, defiantly showing off how much she doesn’t care about whether people find her attractive.
Mia looks up from her phone, her grin widening. I follow her gaze. There’s a guy. She runs up to him and puts her arms around his neck. He dodges her lipsticked kiss, and it lands on his jaw instead. He puts his arm around her waist and off they go, unaware of my bemused gaze.
Unbelievable. Beneath the rage I’m already feeling, a new emotion briefly flashes: anger of sorts but on Byron’s behalf. To have a man like Byron besotted with you, and to still need more. The nerve.
I make sure they’re gone from sig
ht before I start the car and park it a few streets down. My ragged attire serves me well. I blend in, unrecognizable. Not that there are many people to see me. Most of the neighborhood’s inhabitants are in class right now.
Minutes later, I’m climbing the same stairs leading up to the front door. The door doesn’t lock so I go in and find myself in front of another staircase. It’s all so small that I’m suffocating; my head all but brushes the ceiling above the stairs. From the mailboxes, I see that Mia Flynn lives in apartment 3. I climb the stairs and knock softly. Then I try the handle, keeping an eye on the other door across from it just in case.
Locked.
If I know anything about these buildings, they have balconies in the back. I go back outside and circle the building, going through a narrow alley. I need to maneuver around garbage bags and giant recycling bins but it turns out I was right. I can see the back window of apartment 3 from below. It’s a French window, and right now it’s open, nothing but a ratty sliding screen door to keep the world out. Metal stairs lead all the way up.
The sliding screen door is held in place by a latch but it’s easy enough to make a neat hole in the net using the metal nail file I have in my purse. And I’m in.
I look around cautiously, a part of me still disbelieving. But then again, it makes sense. It’s clearer to me now why she never noticed I was trailing her. It’s for the same reason our generation—well, not me, but others my age—posts their location and shots of themselves dancing on the bar on public social networks. They haven’t learned to be afraid. She has no reason to think someone might take enough interest in her to break into her apartment. Carelessness mixed with a hefty dose of delusions of one’s own immortality.
The kitchen is an appalling mess. I almost gag as I take in the sight: dirty frying pans on the stove, a mountain of dishes in the sink, a packet of instant rice on the counter, and the rice itself scattered on the stove top, practically fused to it with congealed fat. A cat enters, stretching. It yawns at me, unsurprised. I give it a look of loathing as it hops right onto the kitchen counter and, unfazed by my presence, begins to eat the bits of rice.