it’s totally fried from the water. You mean you…” She gasps. “Do you have, like, a stalker or something?”
“Can you tell when it was installed?”
“It’s a newer one, we sell this. I think it only came out in the last month or two. Hang on, I can check if the serial number…” She’s quiet for five seconds, ten. “No, we didn’t sell this one. But it’s only been out about six weeks. It’s new.”
I shake my head, order the static to melt away like snow.
“Okay. You can take it out. But just…keep it, I’ll pick it up, too. And fix the keyboard. Is that all that needs fixing?”
“No, it’s the hard drive, too. So it actually won’t be ready until tomorrow.”
I thank her and hang up.
* * *
Tessa is already there when I get home that night, chopping up root vegetables for roasting. She smiles and asks about my day as the butcher knife rolls against the cutting board, thwack thwack thwack. I’ve spent the whole subway ride home trying to come up with an alternate explanation, sifting back through my timeline for another moment my laptop was out of my sight or an innocent reason someone would need a log of every keystroke. Nothing.
I do my best to act normal, to control my smile and keep my body language open, shoulders and chest and tender pink neck exposed. I offer to help and clatter around cheerfully, checking in the cabinets for something missing that she’d deem necessary. I remark that I’m out of parchment paper, but she lines the baking sheets with tin foil instead. I knock my glass measuring cup to the floor, where it explodes into a glorious orbit of shards, but Tessa just sweeps it up, saying she doesn’t need it for anything she’s making tonight.
After dinner I order us cookies from a late-night bakery with notoriously lazy deliverymen, used to dealing with college students and potheads and other such poor tippers. When one leans on the buzzer, I pretend to begin getting up, but she murmurs, “I got it,” and heads for the front door. This is my chance.
I find her laptop in her work bag, in standby, and quickly search for my name; the first file to pop up is a Word document with an inscrutable file name, created in 2009. I hear the front door slam and realize she’s on her way back up; arms shaking, every nerve on fire, I airdrop the files onto my fancy new phone, watching as the taskbar agonizingly slides to the right. I can hear her in the hallway now, slowing from fatigue on the last few steps. Heart pounding, I watch as the little icon switches to “processing,” then turns into a green check mark. As the front door creaks open, I slam Tessa’s laptop closed, heave it back into her bag, and busy myself at the kitchen counter.
Tessa stays over for another two hours, and I keep smiling, keep slowing my heart rate with deep breaths and praying she can’t see my blood vessels banging away in my throat and chest. Feigning normalcy, something I’m practiced at, I’ve been doing it for years. I tell her I’m sleepy—can’t wait to hit the hay, but of course I’ll see you tomorrow, we can get brunch, get home safe, text me when you arrive. She gives me a long hug and I try not to slam the deadbolt too eagerly.
I watch through the window until her bike pulls out in traffic and then I open the document. At first I can’t figure out what I’m reading—it’s first-person, but it doesn’t sound at all like Tessa. Entries are dated, and there are mentions of Sarah and Calhoun Lofts, and nausea is blossoming in my belly and my heart is pounding inside my ribs and my brain is going what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.
July 1, 2008, just a month before Sarah and Edie came into my life: complaints about an annoying dustup with a roommate named Jenna; excitement and trepidation over a boyfriend named Tyler. I scroll forward a few pages, to the Fourth of July: more sadness spinning toward this Jenna, and loneliness, isolation. “I had the dream again,” it reads, “lying on the floor with blood pouring out of me, trying to cry out but I can’t make a sound.” A full year before the bloody miscarriage and then her bloody end. This is obviously Edie’s diary. What the fuck is