PART ONE THE LINE
Devin Crowe had been someone else for three years.
On the dating apps he was Maren. Maren Cole.
Twenty-three, nursing student, soft-spoken, lonely, looking for something real.
Her photos were the same in every profile: a girl with dark hair and a wide, shy smile, sitting on a porch, holding a coffee, standing in fall leaves.
Men fell for those photos. So did women. That was the point.
Devin was twenty-two, a junior at North Central Texas State in Denton.
He lived alone in a one-bedroom off campus.
He had never kissed anyone. He had never had a date.
In high school the girls had looked through him, through to whatever was behind him.
He had decided, somewhere in the back of his head, that if he could not have love then the people who could have it, the people who were better than him, did not deserve it either.
So he made Maren.
Maren was patient. She could wait a month, three months, a year.
She learned what each mark wanted to hear.
She sent the right photo at the right hour.
She texted good morning and good night. She said she was scared, that she had been hurt before, that she wanted to take it slow.
They loved her for it. They sent her photos of their own.
They told her things they had never told anyone.
And then, when they were deep in it, when they had bought the ring in their heads, Devin picked a city and a restaurant and a night.
He let them travel. He let them spend their last dollar.
And at the last minute he texted that there had been an accident.
Then he ghosted. He blocked the number. He deleted the account. He made a new Maren the next week.
He told himself it was funny. He told himself it was fair.
The photos were not Devin’s. They belonged to a girl he had gone to high school with in Lubbock.
Maren Whitfield. She had been kind to him once, in the eleventh grade, and he had fallen in love with her in the way that lonely boys fall in love with kindness.
She had never known. She had married a man named Gabe Delgado right out of high school.
She had two babies now. She lived in Albuquerque.
She had a public Facebook and a public Instagram and she never locked her accounts.
Devin checked both every night. He downloaded her new photos the day she posted them. He fed them into Maren.
She had no idea.
There were thirty-one active marks in Devin’s spreadsheet when February came around. One of them was a boy named Caleb.