Page 15 of Little Secrets
She doesn’t understand why everybody keeps trying to get her to move forward, when all she wants to do is stay still.
Marin kicks her shoes off and enters the kitchen, which smells fresh and clean. When Sebastian was home, she would cook all the time. She doesn’t cook much anymore, and with Derek gone for days at a time, there’s now no need. She misses the comfortable mess of their family life. Even with a cleaning lady scheduled every week, it had never stayed pristine for long. Evidence of Sebastian’s existence would be everywhere, at all times. Cracker crumbs on the kitchen floor underneath the table. Milk stains on the kitchen chairs. Lego pieces and Hot Wheels cars on the staircase. A sock with no twin buried in the couch cushions. Over the past year, those things have been tidied—not all at once, but gradually, as they’ve been discovered—and there is no Sebastian here anymore to messeverything up again. Which is why nobody’s allowed to touch his mudroom cubby, or his bedroom. Daniela still comes every Friday, but now she’s in and out in record time.
“Ma’am Marin, it would be okay for me to come every two weeks?” Daniela once asked shyly, a few months after Sebastian was taken. “The house not so much messy right now.”
“Every week is still fine,” Marin told her. She didn’t want the young woman to lose half the income she’d come to expect from them. “Do whatever needs to be done, and it’s okay to leave early if there isn’t much. I’ll still pay you for the full clean.”
Daniela often wears Bluetooth earbuds when she works, mostly to listen to music, but sometimes she talks on the phone.“Aqui ya no queda much que hacer,”Marin heard her say once, to whomever she was speaking to, as she dusted bookshelves that didn’t need dusting. “Me siento mal de haber tomar su dinero.”
There’s nothing much to do now. I feel bad for taking their money.
Marin brews tea in an oversize mug. She carries it upstairs to the master bedroom, where she settles herself onto the king-size bed and reaches for her MacBook Air. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom has been decorated by a professional, right down to the bamboo bedsheets. Not for the first time, Marin thinks she could be a typical rich woman in a Nancy Meyers rom-com. Except there’s no romance, and no comedy. Nobody’s laughing.
She is in a tragedy.
As her laptop whirs to life, Marin’s tempted to log in to the illegal sites that concerned Dr. Chen, but she holds off. She has other internet business to do. The file Vanessa Castro emailed contains mostly photos and Derek’s massive cell phone records. Castro has included a note at the top of the spreadsheet.
MM— there are too many texts sent between them and logged here for them to also be using athird-party messaging app (like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger). Recommend looking into a program called the Shadow app. You’ll know right away if it’s something that interests you.—VC
Marin doesn’t have to look it up; she knows what the Shadow app is. It came up in group once, and it’s something that Simon said he wishes had been available before his daughter went missing. The Shadow app is a program that allows parents to read their kids’ texts in real time, without their kids knowing. Every text their child sends and receives is downloaded to the Shadow app on their parents’ phone. Simon nearly had a meltdown in group discussing it with them.
“If they’d had this then, Brianna would still be here,” he’d said, his chest heaving. “She’d hate us for spying, but she’d be here.”
It’s marketed toward parents because, in order for the app to work, the cell phone you’re “shadowing” has to be in your name. Kids typically get cell phones as extensions of their parents’ plans. Which is why the app would work for Marin. Early in the marriage, she was the one who got a cell phone first, when she was the one with the steady income and decent credit. A year later, she added a line for Derek, which means that all this time, his phone number has been under her account. It never occurred to either of them to change it, because it never mattered. Which means that all along, Marin could have been checking her husband’s calls.
But why would she ever do that? She doesn’t even bother to look over her own phone records unless there’s something amiss with the monthly billing amount, which there never is because they have the largest data and calling plan.
Marin downloads the app and selects the monthly subscription. The one-year rate is cheaper, but she can’t imagine needing the appfor longer than a couple of weeks. The rest of the setup involves a few brief steps to grant the app permission to access Derek’s number. The app asks if she wants to shadow all of Derek’s texts, or just texts from a specific phone.
She pauses to consider this. Derek’s on his phone constantly for work, same as she is, which means he receives thousands of texts a month. She checks Castro’s file and carefully types in only his mistress’s cell phone number. And then it’s done.
She turns on notifications and waits as the app syncs, half expecting a flood of old text messages to unleash. Then she remembers that it can’t download messages sent prior to the app being activated. Which is disappointing, and kind of anticlimactic. Marin would have liked to see how Derek’s affair with his mistress had progressed. Instead, she has to wait for something new to come in, which, if they were together in Portland this morning, might take a while.
Castro’s file on Derek’s lover is briefer than Marin would have hoped, but this makes sense, as the PI only just learned of the affair and hadn’t known that Marin would ask her to dig deeper into it. It’s basically a snapshot of the other woman’s life. There are links to her Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter, the latter two of which she uses hardly at all. Her address, when Marin enters it into Google Maps, shows an apartment building in the University District. She’s midway through a master’s degree in fine arts, specializing in furniture design. Her previous school was a fine arts college in Boise, Idaho. She has a cat. She has a roommate. She works as a barista at the Green Bean.
Her name is McKenzie Li.
The photocopy of her Washington state driver’s license confirms that she’s indeed twenty-four years old, five foot ten and 135 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Her driver’s license picture, taken two years ago, doesn’t match the photos from Portland taken yesterday. Her current hair color is pale pink, the shade of cotton candy.
Twenty-fucking-four. Pink fucking hair. This might be hilarious if it weren’t actually happening to Marin.
There are more pictures that Castro didn’t show her in the office. Long-lens photos of Derek and McKenzie at the Hotel Monaco last night, with the window blinds wide-open, like they didn’t care who saw them.
Her face. Now that Marin’s home with nowhere to be and nobody watching her reaction, she’s free to fixate on it, and let herself feel how she feels.
And what she feels ishate. Pure, unfiltered, blinding white hate. Marin hates McKenzie Li with every ounce of energy she has left that’s not used for feeling guilty and sad and depressed and terrified.
And, oh god, the hate feelsgood. It’s breathing life into Marin in a way she didn’t know such a negative emotion could.
Based on Derek’s records, it’s obvious that he and his mistress only talk on the phone on the days he isn’t physically with her. There were three whole days two months ago when there was no cell phone contact between them of any kind. Marin checks where Derek was during that time; they have a family calendar they try to keep updated with each other’s schedules. Her husband was in New York City that week, raising capital. Four solid days of meetings with investors in Manhattan.
She opens Safari and looks up McKenzie’s Instagram, which is public, no privacy settings in place. Scrolling through dozens and dozens of photos, Marin finds a bunch from that same week. And there, diluted behind soft-focus filters, is pictorial proof of their New York trip. Pictures of McKenzie standing outside the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. An artfully posed photo of a frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3. A Dolce & Gabbana bag she’s drooling over at Bloomingdale’s. A picture outside the Richard Rodgers Theatre, gleefully holding up two tickets toHamilton.
FuckingHamilton. Marin’s never even seenHamilton.
There are no pictures of Derek and his mistress together, but on the last day there’s one selfie taken on a ferry to Staten Island. It’s a shot of her smiling face, pink hair blowing in the wind with the Statue of Liberty in the background. There’s an arm slung around her shoulders, and it’s undoubtedly masculine. The sleeves of a blue button-down are rolled up to the elbow, the forearm covered in a fine mat of golden hair, a Rolex on the wrist.
Even without the Rolex—which was a birthday gift from Marin—she’d know that arm anywhere. She’s been held by that arm, tickled by that arm, she’s slept on top of that arm. She knows how that arm feelsexactly. She knows where the muscles are, where the veins are, she knows the feel of the hairs on her cheek, and she knows the scent—clean, musky, male—of that skin.
