The Watcher Girl(7)

And then I’m going to make it right.

Whatever that entails.





CHAPTER 3

It’s an ideal day for watching. Clear skies. Sunny. Not a soul in sight.

I cruise past Sutton’s office building shortly after one in the afternoon. I’m here not to find him (yet) but to get my bearings, to paint an observant picture of his day-to-day life.

The parking lot is mostly empty, save for a handful of imported sedans and a red SUV parked beneath a shade tree. No sign of Sutton, not that I’m surprised. He’s a family man. He’s clearly enjoying his weekend with his wife and daughter beyond the confines of this steel-beamed, glass-walled fortress.

I attempt to envision what they might be doing in this moment—only to draw blanks.

It’s strange . . . this feeling of knowing someone so well but also wrestling with the reality that I don’t know him at all anymore. Not the man he’s become. I can only make educated assumptions based on a shared history.

Time changes people.

And people change all the time.

I’d like to believe he kept his gentle demeanor, his jovial spirit, and his easygoing affinity for life, but I won’t know for sure until I find out.

Parking beside an expired meter, I pull up my phone and log on to the central app for Watchers and Guardians—my longtime employer. It’s linked directly to the dark web, where I can retrieve any kind of information on almost anyone in the world . . . aliases, social security numbers, passwords . . . and then store it in encrypted files easily accessible by my company. Odds are if I can’t find that information myself, I can pay someone to find it for me. Fortunately, I’ve uncovered the best internet hiding places over the years, and I’ve established virtual friendships with the most resourceful of souls.

My file on Sutton is small given the fact that it was created a little over a week ago. But I have enough for now. Addresses, mostly. Public voting records. License plate numbers. Seedlings of intel. Jigsaw pieces of data. Sometimes they come together to create a big picture; most of the time they don’t.

If I were here on a weekday, I’d likely find his silver hybrid Toyota SUV parked in the back row—he always liked to get those extra steps in. It’s a sensible car for a sensible man. Environmentally conscious. Reliable. Family-friendly. It gives me hope that he’s still the same old Sutton. Then again, I don’t know what a heartbroken, secretly-obsessed-with-his-ex kind of man would drive.

I imagine him exiting the double glass doors in the front of the limestone building, heading for his car, and running home for lunch at noon to steal a kiss from his wife, maybe even partake in a quick playdate with his young daughter before her nap.

If his life turned out anything like the way he wanted, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland of pressed khakis; ironed button-downs; meticulous-yet-flexible schedules; organic, home-cooked meals; tropical cruise vacations; and a family-focused center.

He once told me his goal in life was to be the perfect husband and the perfect father. Nothing more, nothing less. It was all that mattered to him. His father was perfect. His father’s father was perfect. Whitlock men were family men, born and bred. Traditional. Loyal. All-American.

Perfect.

It made me nauseous to think about all that perfection . . . because I knew what I would do to it if it were mine. All the buttons I would push. All the levers I would pull. All the testing and watching and waiting and suspecting. All the problems I’d invent.

No one deserves that.

My mother, Daphne, got the worst of it. As a child, I pushed every last one of her buttons and frayed every nerve that woman had down to the wire. I would steal. Break. Hide. Scream. Lie. Her patience and tenderness only acted as an accelerant to the fire deep within me. The more she tried to coddle and hold me, the more I kicked and name called. I was never satisfied until her eyes filled with tears. But it was never about making her cry. It was about what would come afterward, after she’d send me to my room for hours of alone time. I lived to see the look on her face when the maelstrom was over, hoping that once . . . just once I’d see love in her eyes.

But I never did.

I retrieve Sutton’s home address online, punch it into my phone’s GPS, and make my way toward 72 Lakemont Street with sweat-prickled armpits and my air conditioner blasting. For years, I pretended this place—this city—didn’t exist. And 90 percent of the time it was easy to forget about the people who live here (my family). But now that I’m here, the air is thick with reality. Every breath anchors me into this moment, where I can’t escape my past because it suffocates me with every familiar street sign.

I’m halfway to Lakemont when I realize it’s all of three blocks from my childhood home—a detail that sends a spray of tingles down the back of my neck.

Intentional?

Over twenty-two thousand residences pepper the winding, picturesque lanes of Monarch Falls. What are the odds he chose that one?

I end the GPS midsentence once I turn onto his street. I know what his house looks like thanks to the public listing on the county assessor’s website. I also know what he paid for it and the exact date he and his wife signed the papers—two Augusts ago on a Wednesday at the Crawford Mills Credit Union.

I recall the summer before our junior year, when we moved into that brick duplex off College Row on the hottest day of the year. For hours, we hauled moving boxes inside. Just us two. My hair held steady in a messy ponytail, and the back of his gray T-shirt was spotted with sweat. We ordered pizza—pepperoni and mushroom for his half, cheese for mine. And we split a six-pack of Miller Lite. We devoured dinner picnic-style, seated on pillows next to our glass coffee table. Bellies full, we contemplated christening the place, but after a cold shower (water heater was busted) with no soap (it was packed away somewhere), the mood was lost. We ended up crashing early, plunking our mattress on the hardwood floor and passing out before the sun went down.