Chương 15
Daniel.
You should have come home when I asked.
Then another message.
Now this gets expensive.
I took screenshots.
This time my hands did not shake.
The copy bar reached sixty-seven percent.
I sat back down.
"Nobody touches that drive."
Beth looked at me.
"What are you thinking?"
I opened a new note on my phone.
"That he wants me scared enough to react."
Mark nodded slowly.
"And?"
I looked at the draft documents on the screen.
"He's been studying my reactions for months."
I typed the time Claire said he arrived.
Then the time he entered the house.
Then the time he left.
Then I recorded the lawyer's name and number.
I added the bank transfer.
The venue footage.
The recorder.
The screenshots.
The messages.
Every ugly little fact.
Beth watched me.
"Anna."
"What?"
"What are you doing?"
I saved the note.
"Giving him a version of me he didn't plan for."
The police reached my parents' house before we finished copying the drive.
Claire called from the locked bedroom while an officer checked the downstairs rooms and another stood with her on the landing.
Daniel was gone.
He had left no damage except a smear on the front door where his hand had pushed against the paint around the frame.
That detail bothered me more than a broken lock would have.
He had entered cleanly.
He had known the code.
He had behaved as though access belonged to him.
The copy finished at eighty-three minutes past four.
Mark made two encrypted copies and handed one to me without ceremony.
"Put this somewhere he can't reach."
I slipped it into Beth's purse.
"Congratulations," she said.
"You're now evidence storage."
"I've always wanted a promotion."
At urgent care, Dad had a small fracture in his right hand.
The nurse wrapped it and told him not to punch anyone else.
Dad said, "That's going to depend on the week."
Mom apologized to the nurse.
The nurse said, "I've heard worse."
I spoke to the officers in a consultation room that smelled faintly of bleach and rubber gloves.
I gave them the timeline.
The paint.
The recorder.
The wedding video.
The transfer.
The messages.
Daniel entering my parents' house after Claire refused to see him.
I did not give them the copied drive immediately.
I told them I had preserved electronic material and wanted to speak with counsel before turning over anything that included financial and personal records.
One officer nodded.
The other wrote it down.
Nobody promised me what would happen.
That helped.
Real life had stopped making promises.
Mom's friend Susan called her daughter, Rachel Kim, who practiced family law and knew enough about protective orders and digital evidence to tell me what not to do until Monday.
She spoke to me by phone from a grocery store parking lot while her children argued in the background about cereal.
"Do not meet him alone."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good."
"Do not delete messages."
"I haven't."
"Do not answer threats with threats."
"I haven't."
"Do not move money out of the frozen joint account until we know exactly what belongs where."
"Okay."
"And don't post anything."
That was the first instruction I disliked.
"The video is everywhere."
"I know."
"People think I cheated."
"I know."
"Daniel planned that."
"I believe you."
"Then why should he get to control the story?"
A child yelled, "Mom, he touched me."
Rachel covered the phone for a second.
When she came back, she sounded tired.
"Because right now, your goal isn't to win the internet."
I looked through the urgent care window at Beth buying crackers from a vending machine.
"What's my goal?"
"Protect yourself."
I hated how sensible that sounded.
That night, I slept in my old bedroom with the door locked.
Not because Daniel had a key.
Because my body wanted the lock.
At two in the morning, I woke convinced I had paint in my mouth.
I sat on the edge of the bed and tasted toothpaste and panic.
My phone held fifty-six unread messages.
I opened none of them.
Instead I went downstairs.
Claire was asleep on the couch.
Mom had let her stay.
I stood in the doorway and watched my sister breathe.
For a moment, I wanted to wake her and say everything cruel I had not yet found time to say.
Then I noticed she was wearing one of Dad's old T-shirts because she had no clothes there.
Her engagement ring was gone.
I went to the kitchen and made toast.
It burned.
I ate it anyway.
By Monday morning, the wedding video had been viewed millions of times.
A second clip had spread too.
Someone had captured my father punching Daniel.
Dad became briefly popular with strangers who had no idea what had happened.
He found this deeply embarrassing and slightly flattering.
"Don't read comments," Mom told him.
"I wasn't."
"You just said someone called you Wedding Dad."
"That could have been anybody."
Rachel met me at her office at nine.
She had already spoken to the bank and arranged for preservation of the joint account records.
The eight-thousand-dollar transfer had gone to another account in Daniel's name.
It had not disappeared into some secret criminal network.
It was simply money he had decided to move before humiliating me.
That somehow felt worse.
Rachel reviewed the copied files with an investigator her firm used for digital preservation.
The original drive stayed sealed in a bag in Mark's possession until we could document where it had come from and how it had been handled.
Nobody treated the files as magical proof.
Metadata had to be verified.
Cloud access had to be traced.
Documents could be altered.
Accounts could be shared.
The process was slow.
Daniel hated slow.
That became useful.
His lawyer sent a formal letter demanding access to the apartment and certain joint property.
Rachel replied.
The apartment lease was in both names.
May you like
Daniel could not simply be locked out without legal process.
So I did not go back.
