All He Has Left(36)

She swallowed, nodded. “Right.”

Jake took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Again, he reminded himself to keep moving forward, so he began searching for a couple of specific tubs. He’d kept everything from Sarah’s home office: books, notepads, journals, lamps, framed photos, and even office supplies. He’d kept all of it. But the most important items to him right now were her day planner and laptop. Jake began shifting boxes and tubs around, searching, building up a sweat while trying to make quick work of all this. It took him some time to pull everything out before he located the two tubs. He found the laptop and stepped back into the hallway to locate an electrical outlet just outside his unit. After plugging in the laptop, he set it on a stack of boxes and then powered it up. But he would need Sarah’s password to get inside.

Jake went back to hunting through the two plastic tubs until he found the black day planner his wife used. Sarah was super practical. She didn’t trust using only the online cloud to store her vital information. So he knew she had a page in the back of her day planner where she’d scribbled down all her important passwords and codes. Flipping through the contents of the day planner brought on a rush of emotion as he stared at his wife’s handwriting and her little notes here and there. There was a family photo of them stuck in the middle of the day planner. They were skiing in Vail. Piper was eight and bundled up in her cute pink-and-purple ski jumpsuit. Tears instantly hit his eyes. The thought of going one more day without her back with him safe was nearly paralyzing. He reached up, wiped his eyes dry with his left hand, and kept searching through the day planner. He finally found the page near the back, located the password, and returned to her laptop.

He paused before typing it in. Did he really want to go here? At the moment, the prospect of an affair was just a stupid thought. Did he really want to go the distance and confirm it actually happened? Reality could be crushing. But what choice did he have? If an affair was somehow the catalyst for all this and helped him find Piper, he had to go there. He typed in her password and gained access to the laptop. There was another family photo as her background. The three of them were celebrating at Chili’s—Piper’s choice—after he’d been hired as the head coach at Stephen F. Austin High School.

Jake connected to the storage facility’s public Wi-Fi account and then opened up a web browser. Then he went to Google Mail, knowing Sarah used it for her personal messages. Jake had done nothing in the past year to shut down any of her email, phone, or social media accounts. The thought of closing the book on Sarah’s life was just too painful. He hoped that decision would pay off for him now in finding some answers. He again searched the day-planner page for Sarah’s passwords and used them to log in to her Gmail account. He could feel his heart racing with anticipation—both dread and hope. It was strange logging back in to his wife’s life, as if she were still alive.

There were thousands of unread messages in her account, nearly all of which came from online stores and retail outlets where Sarah used to shop. Jake had to scroll back to a year ago to find real correspondence between his wife and other people. He finally arrived at the week of her death. Again, it was surreal to see Sarah corresponding with friends and other moms about Piper’s numerous extracurricular activities. There were a few exchanges with Jake that week as they tried to manage the balance between work and home life with Piper. The exchanges seemed extra cold to him now. Like they were just partners and not a married couple. What had happened to them? How could he have let it go so far that Sarah had sought intimacy with someone else?

Jake scanned every email from the entire week but found nothing that stood out to him. There were no email exchanges with any guy that gave Jake the slightest indication that an affair might be happening. Then he thought of another direction to go. While he didn’t have Sarah’s cell phone, Jake did have access to all her texts through her Messages app on her laptop. He opened the app and gave it a second to load. The most recent text messages were first. There weren’t many over the past year, and most of those were spam messages. Jake searched back to the week in question. There were dozens between him and Sarah; again, mostly organizing their life and running Piper around. He paused extra moments on the messages between Piper and her mom. There was a real tenderness in the text messages. Piper had lost so much last year.

He kept searching. Then Jake found a text strand that struck him hard. The contact was someone he knew well and one of the possibilities for an affair he’d thought of earlier. A successful attorney, Brent Grisham was a most-eligible-bachelor type of guy and a real charmer. Sarah and Brent had dated the year before Jake had met her. There were times when Brent was around that Jake felt he’d crossed the line in his casual flirting with his wife. Most of the texts between Sarah and Brent looked like casual banter between old friends. Some of it was about legal counsel. But it was their intimate exchange in the two days before the car crash that put Jake’s heart all the way up in his throat.

Thursday. The day before the hit-and-run crash.

Brent: Hey you. You OK? You were really upset last night.

Sarah: This is hard. I don’t know what to do.

Brent: I know. I’m here.

Sarah: Thanks. I’m glad.

Friday. The day of the crash.

Sarah: When can I see you again?

Brent: Tonight?

Sarah: Can’t. Jake’s game is tonight. Tomorrow?