Page 22 of Cruel Lies

Traveler 2: P. Sampson.

I read it like the letters might rearrange themselves into something else if I stare hard enough. But they don't.

P. Sampson.

NotC. Bradshaw.

He planned to take her instead.

I wait for the tears. I've been waiting three weeks; surelythisis the one that undoes me. The lipstick crescent didn't do it. The eggplant emojis didn't do it. The prospect of my life's work stolen out from under me didn't do it.

SurelySantorini,the trip I starved myself for, will be the thing that finally cracks me open.

Nothing comes.

So that's it, then. That's the last little wobble of hesitation, the soft animal part of me that still, in some basement of my heart, wondered if maybe I was being unfair. If maybe there was some version of this where the man I married came back.

There isn't. He booked my best friend into my honeymoon-redux, and now, there is nothing left in me that is soft.

Good.

I forward the reservation to myself. I add it to the folder.

And then I sit back, and I count.

The scale log. The Spotify history. The iPad threads. The three DocuSign envelopes. My company's formation papers. The pickup records. The FindMy heat map.

When you add the Santorini rebooking…

That's eight.

A laugh comes up out of me. It's a little unhinged, but then again, so is the whole situation.

Eight.My number. The number that's followed me my whole life like a loyal dog, and here it is again, sitting at the bottom of the worst spreadsheet I've ever built.

Guess eight is still lucky after all.

I feed the eighth piece into the stack and watch the dashboard rebuild itself. The Santorini swap slots into the timeline at the eleven-days-ago mark, and the whole architecture tightens, the correlations snapping taut, the picture going fromdamningtobiblical.

Eight streams of Todd's lies braided into a single rope.

And at the end of that rope, a noose with his name on it.

It's beautiful. I built this technology to catch supply-chain fraud. Instead, it caught my husband.

I close the laptop. I've got the receipts.

Now, comes the part I've been looking forward to for three weeks.

I get to decide exactly how he finds out.

7

CALI

You'd think it would be easy.

I have everything I could ever need, all the dirty laundry to air. All that's left is to decide when and how to let it rip.