Page 86 of The Boyfriend Experience

Then I go back to the main living area. Comparing and contrasting her design to mine. Her kitchen is smaller. Everything is smaller. But it’s so clear. It’s so… me.

I feel sick all of a sudden. Almost violated. And I know that’s stupid, because none of this stuff is mine. This isn’t my apartment. All my stuff is safe back in Denver.

But…

“Found something,” Vivi says. “Come and look.”

I walk into the office and round the desk to see what Vivi has on the computer.

And even though I came here with a goal in mind—to find evidence of her stealing my father’s recipes. My recipes, now—I am not prepared for what I see on the screen.

Handwritten recipes, scanned into her computer. In his handwriting.

“She must have the originals around here somewhere,” Vivi says, getting up from the desk chair. I take her seat, while she starts going through file cabinets.

“These are mine,” I say.

“I know,” Vivi replies. “Print them. But we need to find the hard copies too. We’ll take those with us, since they’re yours anyway.”

I scan the list, not trying to figure out which recipes she has, but which ones she does not have.

Because she has them all.

Every single beer we’ve ever developed is in this list. And all of them are in my father’s handwriting.

“I can’t fucking find them,” Vivi says.

“That’s because she scanned them,” I say softly. “She stole these from my apartment, scanned them, and left the originals with me.”

“Delete them,” Vivi says. “Every single one.”

I know I should get up, walk out of here, and forget I ever saw any of this. I know what we’re doing is illegal and I could go to jail. I know that none of this, even if I take it with me, would be admissible in court.

I understand all this. But I highlight every one of those recipe files and my finger hovers over the delete button, ready to take this final action.

But then my phone buzzes a text.

“Shit,” Vivi says. “See if that’s Lawton.”

It is Lawton. I know this even before I see the message on the screen. We’re heading back. If you’re still there, get the fuck out now!

Vivi reads it with me, then presses my finger on the delete button, grabs me by the shoulder, and says, “Get up. I gotta cover my tracks real quick.”

I do. And I just stand there, watching her fingers fly across the keyboard. Deleting her footprints. Covering up that we were here. And then she logs off and gets up, carefully placing the chair up against the desk, and says, “Let’s go.”

We leave the apartment the same way we came, that hole in the glass the one thing we can’t erase. The one piece of evidence we must leave behind.

And a few minutes later we’re back down in the alley, sending the fire escape ladder back up.

The whole way home Vivi is talking. Wild theories coming out of her mouth. Crazy explanations for why Hanna Harlow has all my father’s original recipes.

“She broke in,” she says. Which is the most obvious answer. Especially since my security was so lax. Why was I so naive? She has everything of mine. Everything. And I still have no proof.

“Maybe she hacked you remotely?” Vivi offers, as another theory. “Do you have all those files on your computer too?”

I nod. “My father did it that way. He’d write them out, then scan them into the computer so he could have them on his tablet while he was downstairs.”

“She could’ve hacked you. We can do a forensic trace. There’s no way she could’ve been careful enough to hide all her tracks. Not unless she hired hackers at least as good as me and my cousins.”