Little Secrets (ARC)

by Jennifer Hillier

  “But if you really feel that you’ve taken it as far as you can, I’ll have no choice but to find someone else and start over. Please don’t make me do that, Vanessa. Please.”

  If Castro says no, that there are no more stones to turn, Marin doesn’t know if she’ll survive it. When the police said last year that they’d done everything they could, it was nearly as devastating as losing Sebastian in the first place.

  She knows what the statistics say about missing children. She knows most of them are dead within hours of their disappearance. She knows. If Castro stops looking, Sebastian might as well be dead.

  And if he’s dead, then Marin is, too.

  “I’ll keep looking as long as you want me to, Marin.” It’s the first time Castro’s used her first name, too. Again, it’s like she’s read her mind, and Marin thanks god she found her. Vanessa Castro is the absolute right person for this, perhaps the only person. “I promise, okay? I won’t stop until you tell me to, and I promise you it will stay a priority. Don’t you worry about that. We will always be looking for him. I got you. I’m with you.”

  “Thank you. “ Marin’s body sags with relief. Her eyes sting with tears again. Still, they don’t fall.

  She stands up on wobbly legs, and it takes her two tries to put her coat on. She knows she’ll cry when she gets to the car, and that’s fine, so long as she doesn’t cry here. She mentally says goodbye to the fish, which swishes its vibrant tail one last time before ducking behind a plastic leaf.

  Castro walks her out of the office and back into the small, sparse waiting room. They shake hands. Her grip is firm. Her smile is kind. In any other situation, the two women might have been friends. She’s the exact kind of person Marin might have invited to the Entrepreneurial Women’s Banquet; Marin heads up the committee.

  Castro hesitates, and it’s clear there’s one more thing she wants to say. Marin can either leave quickly, or she can allow the other woman to speak. She decides it would be rude to bolt, so she pauses in the doorway.

  “I’m sorry about your husband,” the PI says.

  Her words, while well meaning, piss Marin off. Why is she apologizing? Why do women do that? Castro didn’t tell her about something awful that she herself had done; she’s reporting back what she learned about her client’s husband and his mistress. She isn’t the one cheating on Marin. Derek is. With a twenty-four-year-old college girl.

  And yet, Vanessa Castro is sorry. Maybe they’re just words and maybe they’re meant to be comforting, but goddamn it, Marin is so sick of other women being sorry for things that aren’t their fault. She’s sick of being sorry for things that aren’t her fault.

  She doesn’t say any of this to Vanessa Castro. She can get up on that soapbox another day. Marin thanks the PI and leaves, and by the time she makes it down the stairs, she’s shaking. By the time she gets to her car, she is internally screaming.

  She is enraged. She feels it washing over her like hot wax, coating her outsides, hardening like an armored shell over all the soft, squishy, vulnerable, unprotected places.

  She welcomes it. It’s been a long time since she felt anger like this, and she’ll take anger over sadness, any day. For the past four hundred eighty-six days, sadness has knocked her sideways, debilitated her, confused her, made her weak, talked her into settling for things she doesn’t want, and never did.

  Rage, on the other hand, will get shit done.

  Chapter 6

  A strange thing happens when you’re going through something terrible. It’s as if your body and mind separate, and you cease to become a whole person. Your body goes through the motions of what you need to do to survive—eat, sleep, excrete, repeat—while your brain further divides into compartments of Things You Need to Do Now, and Things You Should Process Later When You’re in Your Right Mind.

  Marin’s been numb for so long that this spark of anger surprises her. It’s like a limb waking up after falling asleep. The pins-and-needles sensation hurts, kind of, but it also feels good, because it reminds you that you’re alive.

  She sends Sadie a text.

  Not going to make in it this afternoon. Need some space. Don’t worry, I’m ok.

  Sadie responds immediately. She’s probably dying to know what Marin learned at the PI’s office, but she won’t ask—the reassuring “I’m ok” is all she needs for now. Sadie is one of the few people Marin’s allowed herself to trust.

  Understood, her GM replies. I’ll clear the decks. Take care of you.

  Sadie attaches a picture of her daughter, Abigail, wearing the pink elephant onesie Marin gave her for her first birthday last month. Pictures of Abby always make her smile, and she responds with several heart emojis.

  It’s not raining for once, so she rolls down the windows and inhales the fresh spring air. She has the whole day free, but the only thing she wants to do is go home.

  The house in Capitol Hill is not exorbitantly large, not a mansion by any means, but it’s stunning, a little over four thousand square feet on a pie-shaped lot. She and Derek bought the house as a fixer-upper in 2009 after the worst of the crash, and took their time renovating it from bottom to top while they continued to live in their tiny two-bedroom house in Queen Anne. The Capitol Hill home is currently worth a hair over five million. The house in Queen Anne—which they kept, and currently rent out—is worth a little over a million. They’ve never talked about selling either, but it’s good to know these things.

  She pulls into the driveway and then straight into the garage, entering the house through the mudroom that connects the garage to the kitchen. When Sebastian lived here, the mudroom was always a disaster. Boots, shoes, toys, hoodies, and mittens missing their partners were constantly left scattered all over the floor, even though their son had his own little cubby hole and hook where his things could be stored. The cubby even has his name on it. One of her clients—the same one who knitted him the reindeer sweater—had hand-painted all their names in perfect cursive on a small pieces of reclaimed wood as a gift.

  “What does it spell, Mommy?” Sebastian had asked when she mounted his on the wall.

  She stood back to admire it. “It says your name. Sebastian.”

  “The letters look funny.”

  “They’re fancy letters.” Marin picked him up and gave him a kiss. “For your fancy spot. This is where you hang your coat and put your things away, okay? Nobody else can put their things here but you.”

  The cubby and hook are always neat now. Marin fingers Sebastian’s coat as she enters the mudroom, the same one he was wearing that day at the market, the same one he made her carry because he was too hot from all the walking. His coat and rain boots have never been moved from his cubby, another thing her therapist suggested she might want to consider changing.

  “Of course, you don’t have to get rid of anything, Marin,” Dr. Chen had said, a couple of months back. He’d spoken softly, kindly. “But it would be an act of self-care for you to choose not to keep his things where you see them all the time. Perhaps you could move his coat and boots to his bedroom. That way you can still go in and see them whenever you like, rather than be confronted with them every single time you enter the house.”

  “It’s not a confrontation,” Marin insisted, feeling both frustrated and stubborn. That was about the time she began to suspect that she might want to be done with therapy. “There are gaping holes in all the places my son used to be, and I have no desire to relocate them somewhere else.”

  She doesn’t understand why everybody keeps trying to get her to move forward, when all she wants to do is stay still.

  Marin kicks her shoes off and enters the kitchen, which smells fresh and clean. When Sebastian was home, she would cook all the time. She doesn’t cook much anymore, and with Derek gone for days at a time, there’s now no need. She misses the comfortable mess of their family life. Even with a cleaning lady scheduled every week, it had never stayed pristine for long. Evidence of Sebastian’s existence would be everywhere, at all
times. Cracker crumbs on the kitchen floor underneath the table. Milk stains on the kitchen chairs. Lego pieces and Hot Wheels cars on the staircase. A sock with no twin buried in the couch cushions. Over the past year, those things have been tidied—not all at once, but gradually, as they’ve been discovered—and there is no Sebastian here anymore to mess everything up again. Which is why nobody’s allowed to touch his mudroom cubby, or his bedroom. Daniela still comes every Friday, but now she’s in and out in record time.

  “Ma’am Marin, it would be okay for me to come every two weeks?” Daniela once asked shyly, a few months after Sebastian was taken. “The house not so much messy right now.”

  “Every week is still fine,” Marin told her. She didn’t want the young woman to lose half the income she’d come to expect from them. “Do whatever needs to be done, and it’s okay to leave early if there isn’t much. I’ll still pay you for the full clean.”

  Daniela often wears Bluetooth earbuds when she works, mostly to listen to music, but sometimes she talks on the phone. “No hay mucho hacer,” Marin heard her say once, to whomever she was speaking to, as she dusted bookshelves that didn’t need dusting. “Me siento mal por tomar su dinero.”

  There’s nothing much to do now. I feel bad for taking their money.

  Marin brews tea in an oversize mug. She carries it upstairs to the master bedroom, where she settles herself onto the king-size bed and reaches for her MacBook Air. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom has been decorated by a professional, right down to the bamboo bedsheets. Not for the first time, Marin thinks she could be a typical rich woman in a Nancy Meyers rom-com. Except there’s no romance, and no comedy. Nobody’s laughing.

  She is in a tragedy.

  As her laptop whirs to life, Marin’s tempted to log into the illegal sites that concerned Dr. Chen, but she holds off. She has other internet business to do. The file Vanessa Castro emailed contains mostly photos and Derek’s massive cell phone records. Castro has included a note at the top of the spreadsheet.

  MM—there are too many texts sent between them and logged here for them to also be using a third-party messaging app (like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger). Recommend looking into a program called the Shadow app. You’ll know right away if it’s something that interests you.—VC

  Marin doesn’t have to look it up; she knows what the Shadow app is. It came up in group once, and it’s something that Simon said he wishes had been available before his daughter went missing. The Shadow app is a program that allows parents to read their kids’ texts in real time, without their kids knowing. Every text their child sends and receives is downloaded to the Shadow app on their parents’ phone. Simon nearly had a meltdown in group discussing it with them.

  “If they’d had this then, Brianna would still be here,” he’d said, his chest heaving. “She’d hate us for spying, but she’d be here.”

  It’s marketed toward parents because, in order for the app to work, the cell phone you’re “shadowing” has to be in your name. Kids typically get cell phones as extensions of their parents’ plans. Which is why the app would work for Marin. Early in the marriage, she was the one who got a cell phone first, when she was the one with the steady income and decent credit. A year later, she added a line for Derek, which means that all this time, his phone number has been under her account. It never occurred to either of them to change it, because it never mattered. Which means that all along, Marin could have been checking her husband’s calls.

  But why would she ever do that? She doesn’t even bother to look over her own phone records unless there’s something amiss with the monthly billing amount, which there never is because they have the largest data and calling plan.

  Marin downloads the app and selects the monthly subscription. The one-year rate is cheaper, but she can’t imagine needing the app for longer than a couple of weeks. The rest of the setup involves a few brief steps to grant the app permission to access Derek’s number. The app asks if she wants to shadow all of Derek’s texts, or just texts from a specific phone.

  She pauses to consider this. Derek’s on his phone constantly for work, same as she is, which means he receives thousands of texts a month. She checks Castro’s file and carefully types in only his mistress’s cell phone number. And then it’s done.

  She turns on notifications and waits as the app syncs, half expecting a flood of old text messages to unleash. Then she remembers that it can’t download messages sent prior to the app being activated. Which is disappointing, and kind of anticlimactic. Marin would have liked to see how Derek’s affair with his mistress had progressed. Instead, she has to wait for something new to come in, which, if they were together in Portland this morning, might take a while.

  Castro’s file on Derek’s lover is briefer than Marin would have hoped, but this makes sense, as the PI only just learned of the affair and hadn’t known that Marin would ask her to dig deeper into it. It’s basically a snapshot of the other woman’s life. There are links to her Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter, the latter two of which she uses hardly at all. Her address, when Marin enters it into Google Maps, shows an apartment building in the University District. She’s midway through a master’s degree in fine arts, specializing in furniture design. Her previous school was a fine arts college in Boise, Idaho. She has a cat. She has a roommate. She works as a barista at the Green Bean.

  Her name is McKenzie Li.

  The photocopy of her Washington state driver’s license confirms that she’s indeed twenty-four years old, five foot ten and 135 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Her driver’s license picture, taken two years ago, doesn’t match the photos from Portland taken yesterday. Her current hair color is pale pink, the shade of cotton candy.

  Twenty-fucking-four. Pink fucking hair. This might be hilarious if it weren’t actually happening to Marin.

  There are more pictures that Castro didn’t show her in the office. Long-lens photos of Derek and McKenzie at the Hotel Monaco last night, with the window blinds wide-open, like they didn’t care who saw them.

  Her face. Now that Marin’s home with nowhere to be and nobody watching her reaction, she’s free to fixate on it, and let herself feel how she feels.

  And what she feels is hate. Pure, unfiltered, blinding white hate. Marin hates McKenzie Li with every ounce of energy she has left that’s not used for feeling guilty and sad and depressed and terrified.

  And, oh god, the hate feels good. It’s breathing life into Marin in a way she didn’t know such a negative emotion could.

  Based on Derek’s records, it’s obvious that he and his mistress only talk on the phone on the days he isn’t physically with her. There were three whole days two months ago when there was no cell phone contact between them of any kind. Marin checks where Derek was during that time; they have a family calendar they try to keep updated with each other’s schedules. Her husband was in New York City that week, raising capital. Four solid days of meetings with investors in Manhattan.

  She opens Safari and looks up McKenzie’s Instagram, which is fully open, no privacy settings in place. Scrolling through dozens and dozens of photos, Marin finds a bunch from that same week. And there, diluted behind soft-focus filters, is pictorial proof of their New York trip. Pictures of McKenzie standing outside the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. An artfully posed photo of a frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3. A Dolce & Gabbana bag she’s drooling over at Bloomingdale’s. A picture outside the Richard Rodgers Theatre, gleefully holding up two tickets to Hamilton.

  Fucking Hamilton. Marin’s never even seen Hamilton.

  There are no pictures of Derek and his mistress together, but on the last day there’s one selfie taken on a ferry to Staten Island. It’s a shot of her smiling face, pink hair blowing in the wind with the Statue of Liberty in the background. There’s an arm slung around her shoulders, and it’s undoubtedly masculine. The sleeves of a blue button-down are rolled up to the elbow, the forearm covered in a fine mat of golden h
air, a Rolex on the wrist.

  Even without the Rolex—which was a birthday gift from Marin—she’d know that arm anywhere. She’s been held by that arm, tickled by that arm, had slept on top of that arm. She knows how that arm feels exactly. She knows where the muscles are, where the veins are, she knows the feel of the hairs on her cheek, and she knows the scent—clean, musky, male—of that skin.

  In the photo, he isn’t wearing his wedding ring. The photo is captioned: First trip to NYC is in the (Dolce & Gabbana) bag!! (See what I did there haha) Thank you, lady liberty and bae!!!

  Bae? What the hell is bae? Marin googles it, and according to Urban Dictionary, it’s a term of endearment. It means baby, sweetie, “before anything else.” Apparently nobody over the age of thirty would ever use it.

  The picture got over a thousand likes and a couple dozen comments. McKenzie’s followers all asked the same thing: Who’s the mystery man? or Who is bae? She only responded to one person, and she used no words, posting only the emoji with the smile and the tongue hanging out.

  If it’s possible for a person’s blood to boil, then Marin’s sure as shit is. Her temperature shoots up so hard and fast, she wonders if she’s having a hot flash. But as strange as it might sound, it’s helpful to know who, exactly, is trying to destroy her life. The person who took Sebastian doesn’t have a face. But the woman trying to steal her husband does.

  Her phone pings with a sound she’s never heard before, and she jumps slightly. It’s the Shadow app. The little notification badge beside the app icon indicates that there’s one new message, and Marin’s heart thumps as she clicks on it, afraid of what she’ll read but compelled to read it anyway. She added McKenzie to the app’s contacts list, so her name shows up just as it might on Derek’s phone. Assuming he’s programmed it under McKenzie’s actual name.

  McKenzie: The train got in 10 mins early, so I got to work on time! Yay!! Super busy here, already slammed with customers. Boo!! Miss you already. Text me later.