5. Eve
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Eve
By midnight my living room floor has become a war room.
Dean sits cross-legged beside me, a laptop balanced on his knees, a glass of whiskey sweating a ring onto my hardwood that I cannot bring myself to care about.
My own laptop is open and forgotten, screen dimmed, because watching him work turns out to be more interesting than anything I could pull up on mine.
His fingers move across the keyboard with a confidence that borders on arrogant, and every few seconds he mutters something under his breath that drags a laugh out of me before I can stop it.
It’s a strange thing, laughing. My face isn’t used to it anymore.
Three days ago I was facedown on this same floor in sweatpants that may or may not have belonged to my cheating ex, and now I’m sitting here at midnight with a glass of decent whiskey and a man who showed up with two laptops and a plan, and I’m laughing.
“His passwords are pathetic,” he says, not looking up. “They’re all his birthday and the word winner.”
“Of course they are.”
“Same email password since college. Never turned on two-factor.” He exhales, almost a laugh. “This is insulting, honestly. I expected to work for it. I had a whole evening planned. Cracking, brooding, maybe a montage.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“It’s fine. I’ll brood later, on my own time.” He types something, and a new window blooms open. “There. We’re in.”
“That fast?”
“He used Winner2019 with an exclamation point. The man cheated on you with the same imagination he brings to network security.” He glances over, and there’s a flicker of something careful in it, checking whether the joke went over. “Too soon?”
“No.” And it isn’t. It’s the opposite of too soon. It’s the first thing all week that’s made me feel like a person instead of a wound. “Keep going.”
I scoot closer to see the screen. Our shoulders brush, and something goes through me, quick and electric, from the point of contact straight down my spine.
Static. The carpet, the dry air, the whiskey. Definitely that. Definitely not the way his arm feels against mine, solid and warm through his shirtsleeve, the muscle of it shifting when he types.
I am watching his forearms. He’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow at some point in the last hour, and I am a grown woman in the wreckage of her own wedding watching a man’s forearms while he commits light cybercrime on my behalf, and I want to drown myself in the Maldives I just canceled.
I look at the screen. The screen. There is a screen, and it has important revenge on it.
“What am I looking at?”
“His cloud backup.” He scrolls through folders, each one a little window into Simon’s carefully sorted life.
“Photos, documents, texts, everything he’s ever synced.
He didn’t even delete anything. He just filed it.
Look at this. He has a folder labeled taxes and a folder labeled personal and a folder labeled, and I want you to appreciate this, miscellaneous. ”
“Open miscellaneous.”
“You have wonderful instincts.” He clicks. It’s mostly receipts and screenshots of sports bets. “Okay, that one’s a dud. But the man’s whole life is in here, alphabetized. He color-codes his sins.”
“He color-coded our wedding seating chart too,” I say. “Spent an hour on it. Put my college roommate next to his golf friend because he thought they’d, quote, network.”
Dean snorts. “That tracks. Did they?”
“She told him crypto was a Ponzi scheme and left before the toasts.”
“I knew I liked her.” He keeps scrolling, and then his hand goes still on the trackpad. “Huh.”
And there it is. A folder labeled, with breathtaking confidence, K.
The laughter drains out of the room. My stomach drops even as I nod for him to open it. Some part of me already knows. Some part of me has known for months and just refused to look at it head-on.
The folder opens on photos, dozens of them.
Kiara in lingerie across hotel beds, wearing the exact smug expression she brought to my church.
Kiara in what I recognize on the first frame as my apartment, my bedroom, in nothing but Simon’s dress shirt and a satisfied smile.
Screenshots of texts, the same ones I caught a glimpse of that morning, except hundreds of them, stretched across months.
Eight months. The dates don’t lie. Receipts for jewelry I never got. Hotel bookings in cities he swore were conferences. Restaurant charges from places I’ve never set foot in.
The whiskey burns going down. Not as much as the photos burn going in.
“You don’t have to look at these,” Dean says quietly. “I can pull what we need without you seeing a single one.”
“No.” I make myself keep my eyes on the screen. “I want to know exactly what I was apologizing for. All those nights I felt guilty for being annoyed he was late. I want to see what I was being so understanding about.”
He doesn’t argue. He just shifts the laptop a little closer to me, so I don’t have to lean, and lets me look as long as I need to.
He doesn’t fill the silence. He doesn’t tell me how to feel about it.
He just sits there, solid, and waits, and somehow that’s the kindest thing anyone has done for me in days.
Then something in the corner of the folder snags my eye. A subfolder I would have scrolled right past.
“Wait.” It comes out steadier than I feel. “Go back.”
He scrolls up. The subfolder is dated two years ago. Before Kiara. From the first year Simon and I were together, when I’d have sworn we were happy.
“The hell is this,” he murmurs.
He opens it, and a woman I don’t recognize fills the screen. Younger than me, twenty-two, twenty-three, dark curls and a shy smile. In half the photos she’s visibly, heavily pregnant.
Dean goes very still beside me, and the quiet of him makes the back of my neck prickle.
“That’s Rosalie,” he says. “She worked for my parents. A housekeeper. She left out of nowhere about two years ago, when you and Simon were maybe a year into things.”
The words take a second to rearrange into sense. Two years ago, pregnant, gone overnight.
“He got her pregnant.”
“I don’t know.” His jaw works, a muscle jumping under the skin.
“But if he did, that’s a kid. A whole secret kid, hidden from everyone, paid off and made to disappear.
” He scrolls, slow, like the photos might bite.
“That’s not a slip. That’s a pattern. My mother would have handled it.
Quietly. Generously. With an NDA and a moving truck. ”
I sit back, and it feels like missing a stair. The revenge I was so proud of an hour ago, the petty signups and the canceled bungalow, shrinks down to nothing. A water pistol at a structure fire.
Because this is the truth of Simon. He doesn’t just cheat. He ruins people and walks on, and his mother trails behind him with a checkbook and a shovel.
“Okay,” I say, and I’m surprised by how level it comes out. “I need a minute. And I need more whiskey. And I need you to tell me something that isn’t horrible, because if I keep looking at this man’s color-coded affairs I’m going to do something unhinged.”
“Something unhinged like what?”
“I don’t know. Drive to a federal building. Learn arson.”
“Let’s table arson.” He takes the bottle off the floor and refills my glass, then his, and sits back against the couch instead of hunching over the laptop, giving us both a second to be people again.
“Something that isn’t horrible. Okay. When we were kids, Simon told me our grandmother left him her Rolex in the will.
Wore it for a year. Bragged about it. Turned out it was mine.
He’d swapped the tags on the boxes at the reading. ”
“He did not.”
“He absolutely did. I found out when the jeweler called me about a warranty, by name.” Dean takes a sip.
“I let him keep wearing it. Figured a man who’d steal a watch off his own brother would eventually steal from someone who could ruin him for it.
” He tips his glass toward the laptop. “Took twenty years, but here we are.”
I laugh, and it’s a little wet around the edges, and he pretends not to notice. “You’re telling me you saw this coming when you were eight.”
“I’m telling you I’ve had a long time to make peace with who my brother is. You’ve had a week.” His voice gentles. “You’re allowed to need the minute, Eve.”
So I take it. And when I’m ready, I sit back up, and I find I mean it. “Okay. Show me the rest.”
“There’s more. Look at this.”
He pulls up a spreadsheet. Rows and columns that blur together until he starts highlighting cells, one after another, building a shape out of the numbers.
I lean in to read, and leaning in means I’m close enough to smell him.
Cedar and coffee and something warm underneath that I have no business cataloging.
My mouth goes dry. My brain stalls out for a full second, every clever thing in it replaced by static, before I manage to drag my attention back to the crime on the screen.
“These don’t match,” I say. It comes out a little hoarse. I clear my throat.
“No.” If he noticed me forget how to breathe, he’s too kind to say so.
He points at the dates beside the charges.
“These are the nights he told you he was working. Hotels. A necklace. Dinners at places I know for a fact you’ve never set foot in.
And he didn’t pay for a single one of them, Eve.
He used the company’s money. Every romantic thing he ever did for her, he stuck someone else with the bill. ”
The whiskey burns going down, and this burn is different. Cleaner. Because that’s the part that guts me, somehow, worse than the photos did. Not just that he wanted her. That he was cheap about me even while he did it. Coffee shops and excuses for me, hotel suites on stolen money for her.
“That’s enough to get a man fired,” I say.