Chapter 48
Forty-Eight
ROMAN
He’s alone in the house, surrounded by the sounds that make him feel safe. The faint hum of the router on his desk, the odd beep and chime as various notifications ping through on his monitors.
Roman is propped up in bed with his laptop, half a tube of Pringles balanced on one knee and headphones clamped over his ears.
It’s the last proper week of summer—after this it’s school, coursework, the relentless grind towards GCSEs—and he wants to finish what he started because his Orchard Lane surveillance is finally paying off.
He opens the folder named sharpe and scrolls through the files he’s collected. Pretty boring stuff so far, it has to be said. Tenancy documents, insurance certificates, screenshots of a few online accounts that still need the passwords cracking.
He picks at a crisp, salt on his fingers, while music thumps softly in his ears. It’s the kind of monotonous background beat that seems to make time slip through his fingers.
He runs a few more checks through an app he built himself—crude in places, brutally effective in others. He types in a few variations to increase his chances:
emilysharpe, emily_sharpe, emilys85.
There’s nothing for a few seconds, and then one of them pings.
An old Facebook profile loads, the kind people forget exists. This one hasn’t been updated for over three years, and the cover photo is a sunset image stolen from Google Images.
The profile picture is blurry and clearly cropped from somewhere else.
Roman leans closer. It’s her. Sort of.
Her face is rounder, the hair dark and hanging limply around her shoulders. A heavy, blunt fringe and black eyeliner create a severe look that doesn’t suit her. This is not the neat, polite MILF Orchard Lane gets, this is someone mid-reinvention. Still in the process of shedding a skin.
Roman continues to scroll. Most of the content on this old account has gone, but there are fragments that remain. Check-ins at pubs, a few photos with other people, and one caption that just says Finally free! followed by a string of happy emojis.
He saves the link and smiles to himself. Everyone thinks if they delete something online, it’s gone. But most of the time it’s just hidden from view, waiting for someone like Roman to dig it up.
He reaches for another crisp, the crunch echoing in his ears and spoiling the beat.
Next, he switches to Emily’s email. He logs in again . . . not so much hacking it as slipping back in through a door she never realized she left open.
The inbox looks clean now. Suspiciously clean.
He clicks on ‘trash’ and hundreds of deleted messages scroll past. Most are promotional bumf, receipts and subscription newsletters. He searches for some keywords: account, password, delete, photo.
A few results pop up—confirmation emails from old social media sites. He copies the usernames, runs them through the tool again. Some bounce back and are useless, others open ghost pages—fragments of a life stripped down to the bare bones but not quite erased.
He opens one and stares at it.
It’s Emily again, but dark-haired, heavier, with a new hardness in her face. There’s a photo of her in a bar with girlfriends.
And then he stumbles on something unexpected.
He sits back, and the tube of crisps slides off his lap and hits the carpet with a soft clatter. He pauses the music and pulls off the headphones.
Focused now, he digs deeper, opening each ghost account in turn, tracing them through old recovery emails. To Roman, it feels like following a trail of fingerprints that someone has tried to wipe away. Traces almost always remain.
The photos change as they go along. Emily’s hair lightens, the dramatic make-up fades.
The smile gets smaller. There’s one picture taken somewhere sunny, in front of a villa with lots of glass and a sea view—the kind of place his dad always says is for people who think they’re wealthier than they are.
He frowns. Oliver stands beside her in several shots. Dressed in a more casual style, not as groomed, but it’s definitely him.
The mystery is not whether it is Oliver or not, but the name on his tagged account. Here, he appears as Oliver Jacobson.
Roman stares at it. So before Sutton . . . he was Jacobson.
He checks again—date of birth, linked records, old traces.
Same man. Different name.