5. Delilah
DELILAH
I get home a little after one on Christmas Eve. It’s a gloomy day, like the sun just didn’t show up for work.
Before I can even get out of the car, I feel my phone vibrate in the cupholder.
CONNOR: Last minute shopping is a bitch. Might be a while. The mall is a zoo.
I don’t answer it. I open the map instead.
Connor and I have shared our phone locations for years. We set it up back when we liked each other, mostly for airport pickups and to confirm that the other person wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere.
He has almost certainly forgotten it exists.
But in this case, he doesn’t seem to be lying? Or at least, he’s where he says he is.
His dot sits at the Kings Plaza mall, almost certainly surrounded by every other husband in Brooklyn who started shopping today at noon.
So I have the house to myself, and a warning system for when my backstabbing spouse decides to meander back home.
“Take your time, sweetheart,” I say to the windshield.
I go inside, take a seat at the kitchen table, and prop my phone up where I can keep an eye on it, just like I had it at the bakery when Vivian’s stupid photos ruined my life. Then I get to work.
Because today still needs one more thing. I have the videos and the album screenshots. I have the burnt corner with my forged name on it, and the hotel receipt from the night of my father’s funeral. Dates and paper abound.
What I don’t have yet is them—his words and hers, the two of them conspiring in writing. That’s the last gap in the evidence, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of how I’m gonna get my hands on it.
Mom told me to go easy on Vivian, to give her grace.
Well, I’m about to read her texts with my husband.
We’ll see how much “grace” I have left over after that.
Every marriage worth its filing fee has a junk drawer full of accumulated crap. We’re no different than anyone else in that regard.
Going through it is like becoming an archaeologist for a while.
I’m Indiana Jones, dusting off takeout menus from a Thai place that closed during the pandemic, an AAA card that expired when Obama was president, a handful of broken chip clips and bent-out-of-shape staples, a bottle opener from somebody’s wedding with the date printed on it, two chargers for phones that no longer exist on this earth.
Underneath all of it, face-down and forgotten, is the iPad.
We bought it for recipes. That was the plan, at least. Back when I had pep in my step, I’d come home from a day filled with baking just so I could start baking some more.
When the bakery started consuming more and more of my life, free time, and will to persevere, the iPad became Connor’s in-flight entertainment so he didn’t have to squint at the seatback screen.
In practice, I’ve cooked maybe four things off it and he watched half of Gladiator on the way to a work trip in Orlando.
The essential bit here is that he’s still signed in.
He insisted on doing it, as a matter of fact. If I let you take control, you’ll just ask me what your password is a billion times a day. Let me.
He snatched it out of my hands, still in its plastic wrapping, and did it all himself.
Hoisted by his own petard, as they say. I mean, I think someone says that. Truth be told, I’m not one hundred percent sure what it means.
It’s stone-cold dead, though, so the hoisting will have to wait a minute.
I dig the matching cable out from under the menus, plug it in behind the toaster, and then stand in place and wait for the logo of the little apple with a bite taken out of it to appear.
While I wait, I have plenty of time to review every mistake in my life that led me here.
I offer a silent apology to Tonya Blackburn, for secretly putting gum in her hair in second grade after she cut me in line for kickball.
Maybe that was my first sin, and everything that’s followed is downstream of it.
Worth a quick sorry, if nothing else.
Finally, the logo appears. I go over my plan again as the home screen loads.
I can’t screenshot anything or open any unread messages. The second I do, it’ll get synced to the cloud, and I’m not dumb enough to make the same mistakes that got Vivian caught.
“Thank you, Viv,” I say to the empty kitchen. “You’ve taught me so much.”
Then the apple goes away, the login screen replaces it, and we’re ready to get hacking.
Well, “hacking” might be a stretch. I’m typing in my husband’s passcode, the same four-digit sequence he’s used since college. Not quite Ocean’s Eleven.
6969. He’s got the maturity of a tween, I know. I can’t believe I used to find him funny.
As simple as that, I’m in.
Add this to the list of things I can’t quite believe: that two fully-functioning adults can be this stupid.
Am I the only one in this family who knows how to read a settings menu?
Apparently.
I tap through to his messages, find the thread with Vivian, scroll endlessly until I finally reach the top, and start to read.
Strangely, the oldest thing in here is from October of last year. Maybe a sync issue, or something similar.
Which means everything before October of last year is out of my hands. Deleted or stored elsewhere, I can’t be sure and I have no way to know.
I don’t know how far back this goes. But it doesn’t really matter in the end, does it?
All that matters is what I choose to do with it.
The early stuff is hotel logistics.
CONNOR: Booked. Same room if they have it.
CONNOR: [confirmation.pdf]
VIVIAN:
VIVIAN: obsessed. dont text me after 9, im at yvettes
There are a lot of exchanges like that. Scheduling on scheduling on scheduling.
There are also a lot of selfies. Between the ones she uploads to our sisters album and the ones she’s been sending to my husband, I don’t know where Vivian finds the time to actually live her life.
It’s just an endless parade of duck lips and ironic peace signs, of making hearts with herself in the mirror and showing an awful lot of cleavage at every possible moment.
Bathing suits galore.
Bathrobes, too.
And then—
Ew.
I mean, my sister’s sex tape started this whole thing. So I guess seeing her naked shouldn’t bother me.
Also, she’s my sister, so I’ve seen her naked plenty of times in our life. (Even if I was always shy to follow suit, for fear of her pinching my side or mocking my too-wide hips.)
But seeing her naked like this feels different.
It’s so… male-gazey, I guess. Designed to seduce.
Ass on a bathroom counter, hand cupping her breasts.
A mirror shot of her from behind, kneeling on her bedroom carpet.
A pink-panties-clad hip.
A nipple. A tongue. Fingers going up under the hem of a skirt.
I swallow down the tide of nauseous, jealous bile rising up my throat. These emotions won’t serve me now, so I think they’re best saved for later.
Just keep taking pictures on my own phone, file it all away in my growing evidence folder, and repress anything that won’t fit in tonight’s slideshow.
Except that turns out to be harder than I anticipated.
Because, in between the selfies, the scheduling, the sexting, and the sweet nothings, I find a whole ‘nother thing. Their running bit. Their inside joke.
In March:
CONNOR: She made HERSELF a birthday cake this year. Who does that?
VIVIAN: someone with no friends and two appetites lol
VIVIAN: Eat-It-All Delilah
I remember that cake. It was lemon and lavender. I ate it mostly alone, because Vivian had a “rooftop soirée” and Connor got called into “the office” on a Sunday.
More follows. A whole genre of the stuff.
CONNOR: She tried to wear a strapless dress to the charity gala. I told her she looked like Andre the Giant in it, lol.
VIVIAN: ur evil lmaooo
My face starts to heat up. I don’t want to let them trigger me, especially not from a year and change in the past.
But I’m only human, and these two know where to aim to do maximum psychological damage.
VIVIAN: does she know
CONNOR: Know what?
VIVIAN: that those jeans make her look fkin massive
More.
CONNOR: She wanted to have sex last night. I said I had a headache, lol.
VIVIAN: ur so mean
VIVIAN: but also, like, save it all for me bb
CONNOR: I’m serious. It’s like, there’s more of her every year.
VIVIAN:
More. From a family trip to the Catskills on the Fourth of July:
VIVIAN: cn u believe she wore a bikini???
CONNOR: Wish she hadn’t.
I remember that day, too. I felt Viv’s eyes on me and got embarrassed that I didn’t have visible abs like she did.
I ended up pulling on Connor’s shirt, a raggedy gray tee from a 10K he never ran. It stuck to me and made me feel like a wet dishrag the whole afternoon.
The ashamed heat accumulates in every part of me. Every spot of my body they point out, I feel it warming. My face, my hips, my thighs, my stomach, my appetite, the snort I make when I laugh too hard. All of it is just fuel for them.
I don’t even know where to direct my rage. They’re both equally responsible.
Half the time, he’s the one who starts it. He hands her the setup and she takes the swing, then he comes back in underneath with something worse. They’re a duo. They’ve got timing. They’re tighter as a comedy act than he and I ever were as a marriage.
You’d almost admire the teamwork, if you weren’t the material.
But, like the masochist I am, I make myself read every single one.
I don’t have to. My job here is to gather the evidence, and I could do that with my eyes half-closed. Just photograph and scroll, photograph and scroll, get in and get out.
I do, though. I read all of it. In their voices, just so it hurts that much more.
I don’t know what to call that instinct.
Not brave. Not smart, either.
I just don’t want to be told about my own life secondhand ever again.
The last bit is from yesterday morning, minutes after Vivian left my counter with her free desserts.
VIVIAN: mixup with my photos. i handled it. do NOT text me till i say so.
CONNOR: What did you do?
She didn’t reply.
I need a second to recalibrate. I swipe apps on my phone and check to be sure that Connor hasn’t moved.
Sure enough, he’s where I left him, halfway between a Sephora and a Yankee Candle. He’s probably buying me something out of the clearance bin with a bow on it, and then heading into Victoria’s Secret to get something frilly and crotchless for my skinnier, prettier sister.
Gulping, I step back and assess the situation. The facts are thus:
For at least fourteen months, my husband has been sleeping with my sister.
They typically booked rooms at the same hotel, the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge.
They went to one the night we buried my father.
They wrote jokes about my body the whole time. He wrote as many of them as she did.
At some point along the way, someone whom I assume to be Connor forged my name on a loan document for a company named V Haven Holdings, LLC, taking out an unspecified amount of money in my name.
Tonight, I intend to expose both Vivian and Connor for what they’ve done.
I’ve got the stage set at my mom’s house. A big projector screen patiently waiting to broadcast their lies and adultery.
One question remains. In the grand scheme of things, it might not even be that important.
But it feels important to me.
The question is, Do I include the jokes?
I want to. Oh, God, how badly I want to. I’m the butt of them! The scorn was aimed at me!
But cutting them would mean shielding Connor and Vivian from their own words in order to protect my own feelings.
I’d be doing it to spare myself. And the second I do that, I’ve told them one more time that what they think of my body is the most powerful thing in the room.
No.
Hell no.
I want them to know that their opinions mean nothing to me anymore.
And then I want them to fucking burn.
“In it goes,” I say aloud. “Nobody gets spared tonight. Not even me.”
So the jokes go in. I crop a few of the most vicious ones and add them to the folder I’m building.
Then I take a dish towel off the oven handle and wipe the iPad down, front, back, edges, the little metal band around the outside.
I don’t know if fingerprints on an iPad are a thing anybody has ever checked in the history of the world. But my sister got caught by a machine doing something she didn’t know about, and I’d rather be paranoid than be her.
I unplug it, coil the cable, and start sliding it back into the drawer under the menus, arranging them the way they were, more or less, which is to say chaotically.
And then the screen wakes in my hand.
A banner slides down at the top.
VIVIAN: what time can u slip away tonight?
The implication is obvious. Hotels aren’t enough anymore; they want to find a closet or a guest bedroom or a well-shaded shrub around the corner to fall into and rip each other’s clothes off.
While I scurry around my mother’s living room, roleplaying as Cinderella.
Every vengeful cell I possess wants to open it and type out a scathing reply to my sister.
But I don’t. It’s not time quite yet.
Instead, I photograph the lock screen. The newest receipt in the collection.
Proof that tonight isn’t just my plan.
It’s theirs, too.
Then I turn the iPad face-down, settle the menus back over it, and close the drawer on everything.
I pick up my keys and my phone and go back to the front door. Next stop: the bakery.
After that, the party.
I check Connor’s dot on my way out. He’s in the parking lot now. Shopping done, I guess.
I can only shake my head. I wonder if he has any clue of what I’m doing, or of just how soon his life is about to go up in spectacular flames.
Then I laugh.
Relax, my sister told him. She never notices anything.
Turns out they never notice anything, either.