The puncture holes were clean. Back when Nola first arrived . . . she took a knife to them. Just in case.
On Roddy’s right, there was a rev of an engine and a loud screech. Following the sound, he turned just as Nola’s car swerved out of the lot and onto Route 1.
64
Tessa started with their credit cards.
They were easy to check. Mint was the one who paid their bills—a detail that she, like many new widows, was suddenly ashamed of—but the payments were online, and her husband’s password wasn’t hard to guess.
HuckViolet1216.
Same one he used everywhere.
Six minutes of clicking and scrolling revealed what she already knew—that Mint might’ve been dumb and reckless enough to once again be sleeping with Rashida, but he wasn’t stupid enough to use his own credit card to pay for the one item that Tessa was now hunting for. Mint’s second phone. The one O.J. had found—and that his Dover forensic folks were now digging through.
Back when Tessa first entered dental school, one of her professors told her, “If you don’t know what’s causing the problem, you can’t fix it.”
There were answers on that phone. Details about her husband. Yet during the hour-long drive home from Dover, Tessa couldn’t help but wonder, would O.J. share those answers with her?
O.J. and Mint had started their careers together, served together, and buried their fathers within three months of each other. Over a decade ago, O.J. was one of the people they nearly asked to be Violet’s godfather, though they eventually went with Tessa’s flaky but wealthy brother. Family over friends, Tessa had insisted over Mint’s protests.
So would O.J. tell her the truth about the second phone? Depends what was on it.
Feeling her rage start to swell, Tessa slapped the laptop shut, plowed toward her husband’s closet, and rifled through the sock drawer where he hid his watches and cuff links.
That’s where she found the plug—an old micro USB, like the one used by their Kindle back in the day. This plug was new, though. As she suspected, from a burner phone. You made a mistake keeping it here, Archie, which means you probably made more.
It didn’t take long for Tessa to pull apart the rest of his drawers, or the mini safe where they kept their passports and birth certificates, as well as, at the very back, the plaster imprints of the kids’ handprints from when they were born. The plaster was wrapped in pink and blue tissue paper, and as old memories flooded back, she hated her husband for ruining something that used to bring her so much joy.
“Couldn’t help yourself, could you?” Tessa muttered, gripping the charger and storming out into the hallway, toward Mint’s other favorite hiding spot—his home office. She was gritting her teeth so hard, a high-pitched note filled her ears.
As she threw open the door to the office, the smell hit her first, a mix of old leather furniture and coconut oil from the fancy bodywash she bought him for Christmas last—
“Fuuuh!” Tessa shouted as the high-back chair swiveled and moved. She wasn’t alone. Someone was already here.
Her first reaction was to raise a fist, to attack—but as she got closer . . .
“Huck?” she started to ask, though the word didn’t leave her lips.
He was slouched in his seat, his teenage body curled like a magic lamp. In his lap was Mint’s iPad, Huck swiping left, then swiping again, slowly, obliviously, as if he hadn’t heard her come in, or didn’t care.
Onscreen was a childhood photo from Halloween—Huck at seven years old, dressed as Darth Vader. He’d dressed as Darth Vader three Halloweens in a row, loved wearing that massive plastic helmet everywhere: riding his bike, in his car seat, or even in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s office （“for protection,” he used to say）。 To complete the Halloween outfit, Mint had dressed as Obi-Wan those same three years in a row, complete with Jedi robe and glue-on gray beard, though this photo was just of Huck, open hand pointed at the camera, pretending （and believing） that he was using the Force. If only life were that simple.