Chapter 3: Sixty-One Screenshots
Under it, three gray dots. Then Greg’s reply.
Say you’re at Kayla’s study group. We’ll grab you a milkshake on the way home. T says hi 😉
I sat down on Emma’s bed. I don’t remember deciding to. My knees just quit.
There was a photo higher up, sent an hour earlier. A restaurant on the river in Harrisburg; I recognized the red umbrellas. Emma in the middle, grinning around a straw. On one side, my husband. On the other, Tessa Vaughn, her head on his shoulder.
Harrisburg. At least he hadn’t lied about the city.
I scrolled up. I shouldn’t have done it alone, but I did.
March. Greg: Em, this is our secret, okay? Coach T is my friend. Mom wouldn’t understand. She’d wreck everything for Owen.
April. Emma: I hate lying to Mom. Greg: I know, sweetheart. You’re protecting the family. That’s what grown-ups do. AirPods are in my car 😊
August. Emma: Mom asked where we were again. Greg: Tell her practice ran late. She’s been so paranoid lately. Not your fault, kiddo.
Paranoid. I read that word three times.
Then one from two weeks ago that made me put my hand over my mouth.
After Christmas I’m telling Mom I’m moving out. You’ll come live with me and T, right? If a judge asks, just say Mom’s too strict. That’s all you have to say.
He wasn’t just hiding an affair. He was building a case. Against me. With my own daughter as his witness.
I wanted to drive to Harrisburg, walk up to that red umbrella and dump the milkshake in his lap. I had my keys in my hand.
Instead, I called Denise.
Denise Okafor was my roommate at Penn State. Now she’s the family lawyer people in three counties call when they’re scared. She listened without interrupting, which is a talent I’ve never had.
“Okay,” she said. “Laura. You’re going to do nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing loud. You confront him tonight, by midnight he’s deleted everything and coached Emma on what to say. Monday he walks into a lawyer’s office and says his wife is unstable and went through their child’s messages in a rage. Who does a judge believe? The beloved assistant principal, or you?”
We both knew.
“So here’s what we do. Photograph every screen with your own phone. Don’t forward anything. Monday I get a forensic examiner to make a certified copy, with a sworn affidavit. Courts take it very seriously when a parent drags a minor into hiding an affair. But only if the evidence is clean.”
I photographed everything. Sixty-one screenshots. My hands steadied as I worked. It was something to do.
Denise came over at six with Thai food and a legal pad, and we sat at my kitchen table like it was any girls’ night while she wrote it all down in neat block capitals.
At eight-forty, headlights swept across the kitchen window.
“Act normal,” Denise said. She squeezed my hand and left by the back door.
Greg came in with Emma behind him. “Traffic on 81 was a nightmare,” he said. Emma went straight upstairs. I said there was leftover pad thai. My voice sounded like mine. I still don’t know how.
I hid the iPad in the back of my closet, inside a winter boot.
At eleven-fifty I heard Greg’s voice in the hallway, low, outside Emma’s door. Then his footsteps coming back. He climbed into bed beside me and fell asleep the way innocent men do.
At midnight I slipped into the closet and took the iPad out of the boot.
There was a new message at the bottom. Greg to Emma.
Delete our whole thread tonight. Mom can never see this.
And while I watched, the messages began to disappear, one after another, right off the screen.
