before she died. Until then, we’d had access to each other’s phones for years. So we could check a text, see the weather, take a picture. It was a show of trust. It was a promise.
It had never occurred to me that she might’ve locked me out when things turned cold.
I wiped my hand against my shirt and tried to hold perfectly still but could feel my pulse all the way to the tips of my fingers. I held my breath as I tried once more.
The passcode grid disappeared—I was in.
The background of her home screen was a picture of the water. I hadn’t seen it before, but it looked as if it had been taken from the edge of the bluffs at sunrise—the sky two shades of blue and the sun glowing amber just over the horizon. As if she’d stood out there before, contemplating the moment that would follow.
Last I’d seen her phone, the backdrop had been a gradient in shades of purple.
The first thing I did was open her messages to see if she’d sent me something that never came through. But the only things in her inbox were the messages from me. The first, asking where she was. The second, a string of three question marks.
I was listed as Avie in her phone. It was the name she called me whenever we were out in a crowd, a press of bodies, the blur of alcohol—Where are you, Avie?—as if she were telling people that I belonged to her.
There was nothing else in there. No messages from anyone else, and none of our previous correspondence. I wasn’t sure whether the police could access her old messages, either with or without the phone, but there was nothing here for me. Her call log was empty as well. No calls or messages had come through after the ones I had sent. I had presumed that her phone had been lost to the sea, and that was the reason it had been offline when the police tried to ping it. But I looked at the crack in the upper corner again, wondering if her phone had been dropped or thrown—if the same event that had cracked the screen had knocked the power out, too.
Had she been afraid as she stood at the entrance to my room? Had her face faltered, like she was waiting for me to come with her? To ask her what was wrong?
I clicked on the email icon, but her work account had been deactivated in the year since her death. She had a second, personal account that was overstuffed with nothing of relevance—spam, sale alerts, recurrent appointment reminders that she’d never gotten the chance to cancel. Anything prior to her death was no longer accessible. I tried not to do anything permanent or traceable on her phone, like clicking any of the unread emails open. But there was no harm in looking.
I checked her photos next, a page of thumbnails that had not been deleted. I sat on my desk chair, scrolling through them while the phone was still gaining charge. Scenic pictures taken around Littleport: a winding mountain road in a tunnel of trees, the docks, the bluffs, Breaker Beach at dusk. I’d never gotten the sense that she’d been interested in photography, but Littleport had a way of doing that to people. Inspiring you to see more, to crack open your soul and look again.
Scrolling back further, I saw more pictures of a personal variety: Sadie with the ocean behind her; Sadie and Luce at the pool; Parker and Luce across the table from her, out to dinner somewhere. Clinking glasses. Laughing.
I stopped scrolling. An image of a man, familiar in a way that stopped my heart.
Sunglasses on, hands behind his head, lying back, shirtless and tan. Connor, on his boat. Sadie, standing above him to get the shot.
Maybe these photos had been accessible from elsewhere by the police. Maybe this was why the police kept asking about Connor. About the two of them together. He could deny it all he wanted, but here he was.
* * *
SADIE HAD KNOWN CONNOR’S name almost as long as she’d known mine. But as far as I was aware, they had never spoken before. That first summer, while Sadie’s world was opening up to me, she was looking at mine with a sort of unrestrained curiosity.
Her eyes lit up at my stories—the more outrageous, the better. It became addictive, taking these pieces of that dark, lonely winter