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 is hate. 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 feels good. 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 to Hamilton.
Fucking Hamilton. Marin’s never even seen Hamilton.
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 feels exactly. 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.
In the photo, he isn’t wearing his wedding ring. The photo is captioned: