I settled on a flame emoji and typed, Can’t wait. See you soon.
Ignoring Vero’s smirk, I saved the image to my camera roll, shamelessly wondering if the resolution was high enough to make it a screen saver on my laptop.
“We should check his Instagram. I bet there’ll be more,” Vero suggested.
I locked my phone and set it facedown behind me. “No, we shouldn’t. That would be creepy and wrong.”
“Don’t even tell me you’re not curious.”
“If you’re so curious, check them from your phone.”
“I don’t have an account,” she reminded me, reaching around me and plucking my phone off the floor.
“Why not?” I asked. It had always seemed strange to me that someone as stunning and fashionable as Vero wouldn’t have a single social media account. I was pretty sure if she posted a selfie now, even in her flannel pajamas, she’d have a thousand followers within an hour.
“Because I don’t need the whole world knowing my business.”
“What about your friends?”
“You and Ramón know where to find me.” Her brow furrowed as she typed in my password and scrolled around. “Huh,” she said, frowning at the screen. “Julian’s account is set to private.”
“No, it’s not. I was just on it a few days ago.”
“I thought you said it was creepy and wrong.”
“Give me that.” I took the phone, surprised to see Vero was right. With the exception of his thumbnail pic and a one-line bio, Julian’s account was locked. “That’s strange. Why would he change his settings now?”
Vero’s eyes crinkled with sympathy, as if the answer should have been obvious. Julian was on a road trip with his friends, drinking and cutting loose at the beach. And I was here, stalking my ex and buying batteries for power tools.
“Whatever. I have more important things to worry about.” Ignoring the ache in my throat, I tossed my phone on the carpet and picked up a marker, determined not to think about Julian or what he was doing. “Like this EasyClean person and what she plans to do to my ex-husband.”
I snapped off the cap and wrote Steven’s name in angry red letters across the top of the long sheet of paper between us. Beside it, I wrote a date: October 29. Below that, I drew two vertical lines, dividing the paper into three sections.
“What are you doing?” Vero asked around a mouthful of popcorn.
“What I should have done a month ago. I’m going to figure out who FedUp is and find a way to stop her.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“The same way I write a story.”
“Not showering for days while you hoover gummy bears in your pajamas and swear at your laptop?”
“No,” I said irritably, “I’m plotting Steven’s murder.”
“Thank you, baby Jesus, it’s about damn time.”
Vero ducked, giggling as I threw the marker at her head. “Not literally. I’m making a list of everyone Steven’s managed to piss off. Then I’ll figure out which one of them has the strongest motive to kill him.”
Vero’s laughter quieted as she surveyed the length of paper. “I hate to break it to you, Finn, but you’re going to need another roll.”
“We have to start somewhere.” I labeled the three sections. “People usually murder for one of three reasons: love, money, or revenge.” Under the revenge section, I wrote Theresa’s name. “FedUp first posted about Steven on October 29, two days after Theresa was arrested.” Steven and Theresa’s relationship had already been on shaky ground, but according to Georgia, they’d had a nasty fight in the police station and Steven had called off the engagement the night she was booked. The next morning, Steven had moved out of her house, taken back her two-carat engagement ring, and withdrawn his money from their joint checking accounts.
Vero shook her head, chewing thoughtfully on a popcorn kernel as she worked through a tangle in the lights. “There’s no way Theresa could have written that post. She was still in jail.”
Vero had a point. Aimee had posted bail, but that had taken days. Theresa wouldn’t have had unfettered access to a computer while in custody, or for that matter, enough privacy and time to pull it off.
Vero jutted her chin at my chart. “Who else do you have?”
“As far as spurned lovers? The only one I know of is Bree.”
Vero glanced up from her Christmas lights, wrinkling her nose as I wrote Bree’s name under the “love” column. “Why would Bree want to kill Steven? I thought she was crazy about him.”