photo which had been taken inside her house.
The air-conditioning in the car was now fully up and running, cold air flowing from the vents and washing over her, but she barely noticed it. She had goose pimples up and down her arms and legs, but it was not the cold air raising them. It was not the cold air chilling her.
It was the photos. Of her, of Ben, of her house.
Of her kids.
Who was doing this? It had to be someone who was at all these places, someone who was at the beach yesterday and out on date nights with her and there when she was with her girlfriends and at Faye’s pre-school performances.
There was no one. Not even Ben.
And why? Was it some kind of a joke? Maybe all her friends were in on it – which would explain how they had so many photos – but why? What did they get from it? And why do it for six months without telling her? Why do it at all?
It made no sense.
Worse, she thought, a cruel trick by my friends is the best explanation I can hope for. I have no idea what the alternatives are, but I bet none of them are good.
She looked back down at her phone and scrolled through the photos. This was not her friends. A joke at her expense – perhaps a fake Facebook account in her name in which she made off-color jokes or revealing admissions about her sex life – was just about possible. Toni had been a bit of a prankster in college – calling for pizzas for other people’s houses, that kind of thing – and, although she had mostly grown out of it, she still retained part of her juvenile nature. She always would. It was in her blood. Her father and two elder brothers never stopped playing tricks on each other, Toni and her long-suffering mom. The first time Sarah had stayed at their house on Cape Cod, in the summer of their freshman year in college, Marty, Toni’s dad, had made boiled eggs for breakfast, serving them in dainty porcelain egg cups with neatly sliced toast glistening with butter besides them.
Eat, he said. It’s my specialty.
Boiled eggs aren’t much of a specialty, Dad, Toni replied, still sleepy.
These I call Marty’s Boiled Eggs Surprise, he said. Dig in.
Sarah tapped the shell with her spoon. It cracked and she pulled it away. For a second she didn’t understand, then she looked up at Marty – he insisted she call him Marty and not Mr Gorchoff, which made her feel grown up and a bit uncomfortable at the same time – and told him the egg was empty. It was a hollow shell.
That’s the surprise! he said. Your egg’s not there.
He passed her a mug of coffee. She took a sip, and then another – it was a wonderful, heady brew – then glimpsed a sudden blaze of color among the brown, muddy coffee, which disappeared when she held the coffee mug upright.
She tilted it again, and there it was.
An egg yolk.
Mr Gor— Marty, she said. There’s an egg in there!
That’s the other part of the surprise, he said. But don’t worry! They’re organic!
She had spent the rest of the weekend in terror of the next little ‘surprise’, but mercifully she had been left alone. Toni, however, had grown up being constantly subjected to pranks which were a touch cruel and more than a touch irresponsible – so it was not impossible she would have set up a fake Facebook account in her friend’s name.
But not one with Sarah’s kids on it.
Like most of her mom friends, Sarah was a little tentative about putting photos of her children up on the Internet, whatever Facebook said about privacy, so she restricted access to her account to only her friends, and then she was careful about what she put up there.
But this account was public. These photos were there for all the world to see. And even Toni would not have gone this far in the service of some prank.
Which left who? Ben? He’d have access to the photos – he could get them from her phone – but she couldn’t imagine him doing it. He’d have to have set it up on his work computer and then made sure she never saw any of the notifications and emails that would come in. She often used his phone, and – she wasn’t proud of this, but it was true nonetheless – gave his emails and text messages a quick scan. They were reassuringly boring. Stuff from his colleagues about operating committee presentations and legal reviews and seeking board approval and texts from his friends about where to watch the game and whether they had a pass from the wife to go out.
No, if it was Ben, he would have had to employ a level of deception she did not think he had in him, not least because his utter cluelessness about how computers worked would have to be a long-standing deception requiring a level of acting talent she was pretty sure was beyond him.
Pretty sure. But you never really knew. You heard of stranger things in marriages.
She shook her head and dismissed the thought. There was no way this was Ben.
But then who? Who the fuck was doing this?
So, she has found it, finally. It has taken a while. It has been there for six months, a piece of bait, dangling in the water. But she has not sensed it until now. Not been aware of its presence. She is not the most observant of people – surprising, for a doctor – which works against her. It makes it easier to do a thing like this.
Obviously she does not Google herself. That is a mistake. It’s always a good idea to know what is out there, to have the best available information, to know what your enemy knows. But then, if you don’t even know you have an enemy, why would you bother?
She will be wondering who did it, who put these photos up there, and she will be asking herself why, but she will not figure it out. Her mind does not work in such a way. She sees no reason why anybody would do this to her. She doesn’t even know how they would do it, although the who and the how are closely related. Understand one, and she will understand the other.
But she will understand neither.
Not, at least, until it is too late.
Because this is only the beginning. This Facebook account is merely the hook that lodges in the mouth of the fish. The fish thinks the hook is its only problem, thinks that if it can only get rid of it, then all will be well again in its world.
But it is wrong. Because the hook is attached to a line which is attached to a rod which is held by a hand. And the hand is controlled by a mind, a mind which has been waiting and watching and plotting the best time and place and method to catch the fish.
And so the fish struggles to free itself, but all it manages to do is to embed the hook deeper. And as it continues to wriggle and fight it uses up its supplies of energy until it is too exhausted to continue, and then its struggles wane.
And the hand senses it, and begins to wind in the reel …
So far she has only felt the prick of the hook in her cheek. The rest – the struggles, the
