Chapter 3
three
Celeste
It doesn’t take long before my ex Darren reminds me that distance doesn't stop someone who knows your passwords.
I've been careful since Vancouver. New email accounts, new phone number, stripped my professional presence down to what I could control. I know he has people monitoring my public activity, but I thought I'd been thorough. I thought I'd closed everything that mattered.
What I missed was the old project management account. Darren and I built it together in year two of the business. A joint login, both names on it, a relic I'd stopped using when everything collapsed. I hadn't closed it. I'd just stopped thinking about it.
He's been in it for weeks. I find this out on a Tuesday when I try to log in to pull an old file and find the account locked — too many failed password attempts from an IP address that isn't mine.
When I contact support and get the access log, I can see forty-three logins.
My last entry was eight months ago. Every other record since then is him.
He's read everything. Every client note, every research file I stored there before I knew I needed to be careful, every email thread from the last year of the business.
Including, at the top of the stack, a thread where I mentioned to a former colleague that I was doing independent research in Silver Ridge. A rough paragraph about the study. The name of the development foundation I'd been planning to pitch. The name Tara.
He's known about the Silver Ridge study for months.
I lock him out of the account, change every password I haven't already changed, screenshot the full access log. Then I sit at my desk and think about the fact that he's been reading and waiting, and he's already moved.
Ross shows up at one for the afternoon session. He comes around the back of his truck and stops when he sees my face.
"What happened?" he asks immediately.
I tell him.
He listens without interrupting. When I finish he's quiet before speaking.
"Screenshot everything and keep it somewhere he can't reach," he says.
"Separate email account, not connected to anything he's ever touched.
If he does something else with what he found, you need documentation that predates it. "
"That's what I did."
"Good." He holds my gaze. "And close every account you've ever shared with him. Even the dormant ones. Especially the dormant ones."
"Already done." I pause. "How do you think like that?"
He considers this. "The rigs teach you. When something goes wrong offshore, first thing they ask is what you knew and when you knew it.
I learned to document everything automatically.
" He sets his toolbag on the kitchen table and doesn't reach for it, which means he's still thinking.
"Someone like Darren, well, he's patient.
He collects information and uses it when the moment is right.
The only thing that stops that is having a better record than he does. "
I look at him. He's just described Darren more accurately than anyone who's actually met him.
We stay at the kitchen table for an hour and I tell him things I haven't said out loud since I left Vancouver.
Not just the what-happened but the shape of it — what it's like to build something for three years and have someone you trusted completely look at it and decide it was easier to take than to compete with.
What it costs to realize you gave someone all the access codes to your life because you thought you were building something together.
Ross listens the way he does everything: completely, without performing it.
When I stop talking, the silence doesn't feel like an absence. It feels like he's waiting until he has the right thing.
"Three years ago I was working a platform in the North Sea," he says finally.
"Sixteen months into the posting. My closest friend on that rig was a man named Pete Galloway.
Funny, loud, the kind of person who could get anyone talking.
We'd worked together long enough that I trusted him without thinking about it.
" He stops. Picks up his coffee. "There was an explosion in the lower deck.
Fire suppression failure. Pete was working down there. "
He doesn't say what happened next.
"I pulled him out," he says. "That's the part people always want to know — did I try?
I did. It wasn't enough." A pause. "The part nobody asks about is the six months after.
What it does to you when the person you trusted to always be there isn't there anymore.
When you've built a whole way of working, a whole life on a platform, around the assumption that he's in it with you. "
The kitchen is quiet.
"It's not the same as what you went through," he says. "What he did to you is a different thing. But the trusting completely — and then having to figure out what you do after."
"Yeah," I say. "The shape of it."
We work until dark. The rewire session runs long — a junction box in the utility room that needs more time than either of us planned — and by the time he's packing up, the kitchen light is the only warm thing in the house.
He snaps his toolbag shut and straightens and turns, and I'm right there because I'd come to tell him I'd made tea, and the distance between us is about eighteen inches and then it isn't.
He goes still. I go still.
He looks at me the way he looked at that junction box in the crawlspace — like he's taking a reading. Like he needs to know exactly what he's working with before he touches anything.
Then he raises one hand and puts his thumb along my cheekbone. Just that. Just his thumb, slow and deliberate, tracing the line of it. His eyes on my face. Not my mouth — my eyes, the whole time, like he's asking something that doesn't have words.
I don't move. I don't breathe particularly well.
He takes his hand back.
"Lock up," he says. And he goes.
I stand in the kitchen for a full minute after his truck pulls out.
The spot where his thumb was is still warm.
I press two fingers to my own cheekbone like I'm checking a circuit, which is possibly the most Celeste thing I've ever done, and then I make tea I don't drink and sit at my desk and think about the shape of his hand and the fact that he looked at my eyes, not my mouth, and what the difference means.
He trusted someone completely and it cost him everything. So did I. We've both been careful since then. We're both being careful right now.