I did not call the police immediately.<\/p>\n
That decision would trouble me later, but at three in the morning, fear did not arrange itself neatly enough for good decisions.<\/p>\n
I stood beside the bed with my phone in my hand and imagined the conversation.<\/p>\n
My husband drugs me.<\/p>\n
He photographs me while I sleep.<\/p>\n
He cuts pieces from my clothes.<\/p>\n
He collects samples.<\/p>\n
Someone sends him instructions.<\/p>\n
It sounded unbelievable even to me, and I had watched it happen.<\/p>\n
More importantly, Dererick had taken the camera, the notebook and the samples with him.<\/p>\n
If officers arrived and searched the room, what would they find?<\/p>\n
A missing square from my pajama top.<\/p>\n
A rinsed tea mug.<\/p>\n
My word.<\/p>\n
I wanted something he could not explain away.<\/p>\n
Something that would survive his charm.<\/p>\n
Dererick had always been good with people.<\/p>\n
That fact now looked different too.<\/p>\n
At restaurants, servers remembered him. My parents liked him almost immediately. When our insurance company made an error, he spent forty minutes on the phone and somehow ended the call laughing with the representative.<\/p>\n
If police questioned him with nothing concrete, he would sound reasonable.<\/p>\n
He would tell them I was exhausted.<\/p>\n
Stressed.<\/p>\n
Confused.<\/p>\n
Maybe sleepwalking.<\/p>\n
He had already been building that explanation.<\/p>\n
So I began searching.<\/p>\n
First the bedroom.<\/p>\n
I checked the dresser where he had placed the camera.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
I opened the closet and moved through his jackets, running my hands through pockets.<\/p>\n
Receipts. Business cards. Mints.<\/p>\n
No notebook.<\/p>\n
I checked behind stacked shoe boxes, beneath folded sweaters, inside the suitcase he used for short trips.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
Then I remembered that Dererick owned a second laptop.<\/p>\n
He kept his work computer in a leather shoulder bag and complained constantly about company security settings.<\/p>\n
The other laptop was personal.<\/p>\n
He rarely used it around me.<\/p>\n
Months earlier I had asked why he needed two computers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWork machine\u2019s monitored,\u201d he had said. \u201cI like having something that belongs to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time, that answer had made perfect sense.<\/p>\n
Now I could not remember the last time I had actually seen the personal laptop.<\/p>\n
I searched his side of the closet again.<\/p>\n
Behind the hanging shirts, nothing.<\/p>\n
Top shelf, nothing.<\/p>\n
Then I got down on my knees and looked beneath the bed.<\/p>\n
Dust.<\/p>\n
A lost sock.<\/p>\n
One storage box filled with winter blankets.<\/p>\n
And farther toward the headboard, pushed so deep into shadow that I could barely see it, a hard-sided briefcase.<\/p>\n
I reached for the handle.<\/p>\n
The case was heavier than I expected.<\/p>\n
It had two combination locks.<\/p>\n
I stared at them.<\/p>\n
Three digits each.<\/p>\n
Dererick liked passwords built from dates.<\/p>\n
He considered them easy to remember.<\/p>\n
I tried his birthday.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
My birthday.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
Then our wedding anniversary.<\/p>\n
The first lock clicked.<\/p>\n
I set the same sequence on the second.<\/p>\n
Another click.<\/p>\n
My skin prickled.<\/p>\n
The briefcase opened.<\/p>\n
Inside was the personal laptop.<\/p>\n
A stack of envelopes.<\/p>\n
Two flash drives.<\/p>\n
A small external hard drive.<\/p>\n
And several folded sheets of paper.<\/p>\n
I sat on the floor with the case between my knees.<\/p>\n
For several seconds I could not touch anything.<\/p>\n
Opening it felt different from searching the room.<\/p>\n
This was deliberate.<\/p>\n
I was entering the place where Dererick had chosen to hide things.<\/p>\n
Once I turned on that laptop, there would be no pretending I had merely misunderstood a strange night.<\/p>\n
I pressed the power button.<\/p>\n
The screen illuminated.<\/p>\n
Password required.<\/p>\n
I tried our anniversary.<\/p>\n
Wrong.<\/p>\n
His birthday.<\/p>\n
Wrong.<\/p>\n
Then I noticed a handwritten note attached to one of the envelopes.<\/p>\n
A string of letters and numbers.<\/p>\n
It might have been meaningless.<\/p>\n
I typed it.<\/p>\n
The desktop appeared.<\/p>\n
My stomach dropped.<\/p>\n
There were almost no icons.<\/p>\n
Browser.<\/p>\n
Documents.<\/p>\n
One folder labeled ARCHIVE.<\/p>\n
I clicked it.<\/p>\n
Inside were folders arranged by year and month.<\/p>\n
The earliest dated back more than a year.<\/p>\n
I opened the most recent.<\/p>\n
There were dozens of subfolders.<\/p>\n
Most had numbers.<\/p>\n
A few had names.<\/p>\n
One was mine.<\/p>\n
ANNA.<\/p>\n
I stared at my own name on my husband\u2019s computer.<\/p>\n
The folder contained hundreds of files.<\/p>\n
Photographs.<\/p>\n
The first image opened slowly.<\/p>\n
I was sleeping.<\/p>\n
At least I looked asleep.<\/p>\n
The date was eight months earlier.<\/p>\n
Eight months.<\/p>\n
I had believed the problem started three weeks ago.<\/p>\n
My hand slipped from the trackpad.<\/p>\n
Eight months earlier, I had not noticed anything unusual. No groggy mornings that stood out. No bruises.<\/p>\n
I opened another picture.<\/p>\n
I lay on my back wearing an old blue T-shirt.<\/p>\n
Another.<\/p>\n
My head was turned toward the window.<\/p>\n
Another.<\/p>\n
Dererick\u2019s gloved hand was visible near my shoulder.<\/p>\n
I covered my mouth.<\/p>\n
There were pictures from nights I remembered only as ordinary evenings.<\/p>\n
Our anniversary week.<\/p>\n
The weekend after Clare\u2019s birthday.<\/p>\n
A Tuesday when Dererick had made chili and we had watched television until ten.<\/p>\n
He had been doing this while I still trusted him completely.<\/p>\n
I scrolled downward.<\/p>\n
The photographs became more organized over time.<\/p>\n
Dates.<\/p>\n
Angles.<\/p>\n
Folders inside folders.<\/p>\n
Some included short text files.<\/p>\n
I opened one.<\/p>\n
Dosage.<\/p>\n
Duration.<\/p>\n
Response.<\/p>\n
No complications.<\/p>\n
I stopped reading.<\/p>\n
The word dosage seemed to detach itself from everything around it.<\/p>\n
He had not simply found me deeply asleep.<\/p>\n
He had been giving me something.<\/p>\n
Probably for months.<\/p>\n
I remembered every cup of tea he had carried to me with that small domestic smile.<\/p>\n
My stomach cramped.<\/p>\n
I hurried to the bathroom and vomited into the sink.<\/p>\n
Nothing much came up.<\/p>\n
I rinsed my mouth, splashed cold water over my face and looked at myself in the mirror.<\/p>\n
My pupils seemed enormous.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need proof,\u201d I whispered.<\/p>\n
Hearing my own voice steadied me slightly.<\/p>\n
I returned to the bedroom.<\/p>\n
I found a spare flash drive in my desk downstairs and plugged it into Dererick\u2019s laptop.<\/p>\n
Copying the entire archive would take too long.<\/p>\n
So I started with my folder.<\/p>\n
The progress bar crawled.<\/p>\n
While it copied, I examined the surrounding directories.<\/p>\n
That was when I saw the first unfamiliar woman\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
JENNIFER.<\/p>\n
Below it:<\/p>\n
PATRICIA.<\/p>\n
MICHELLE.<\/p>\n
Three more folders followed, each labeled with another woman's name.<\/p>\n
My throat tightened.<\/p>\n
Until that moment, some part of my fear had remained personal.<\/p>\n
Whatever Dererick was doing, he was doing it to me.<\/p>\n
The other folders changed the scale of everything.<\/p>\n
I opened Jennifer\u2019s.<\/p>\n
The first photograph showed a woman perhaps in her late thirties lying on a sofa.<\/p>\n
Brown hair.<\/p>\n
Green sweatshirt.<\/p>\n
Eyes closed.<\/p>\n
A second picture showed her in a bed I did not recognize.<\/p>\n
Then more.<\/p>\n
Dozens.<\/p>\n
The pattern resembled mine.<\/p>\n
Different positions.<\/p>\n
Different dates.<\/p>\n
Fabric samples photographed beside labels.<\/p>\n
Short notes.<\/p>\n
I scrolled forward several months.<\/p>\n
Jennifer looked thinner.<\/p>\n
Another photograph showed dark circles beneath her eyes.<\/p>\n
In a later image, her cheeks appeared hollow.<\/p>\n
I felt an instinctive urge to stop looking.<\/p>\n
I did not.<\/p>\n
Patricia\u2019s folder showed something similar.<\/p>\n
At first she looked healthy.<\/p>\n
Over time, her appearance changed.<\/p>\n
Not dramatically from one image to the next.<\/p>\n
Gradually.<\/p>\n
That made it worse.<\/p>\n
Michelle too.<\/p>\n
The photographs formed timelines.<\/p>\n
My husband had been documenting women becoming unwell.<\/p>\n
I thought of the swab touching my neck.<\/p>\n
Good response.<\/p>\n
The words from his notebook returned.<\/p>\n
What response was he measuring?<\/p>\n
Sleep?<\/p>\n
Medication?<\/p>\n
Something else?<\/p>\n
I searched Jennifer\u2019s folder for a final date.<\/p>\n
The last images had been taken four months earlier.<\/p>\n
Then nothing.<\/p>\n
Patricia\u2019s stopped seven months ago.<\/p>\n
Michelle\u2019s stopped nearly a year ago.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
Had Dererick stopped seeing them?<\/p>\n
Had they discovered him?<\/p>\n
Had they moved away?<\/p>\n
I could not allow myself to consider the other possibility.<\/p>\n
The copy process finished.<\/p>\n
I moved to the next folder and began transferring documents and small files.<\/p>\n
Then I searched the laptop for my own name.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of results appeared.<\/p>\n
Photograph metadata.<\/p>\n
Notes.<\/p>\n
Messages.<\/p>\n
A spreadsheet.<\/p>\n
One file was labeled CLIENT COMMUNICATIONS.<\/p>\n
I clicked it.<\/p>\n
The document opened to a long sequence of copied messages.<\/p>\n
Names had been replaced by usernames.<\/p>\n
Dates went back years.<\/p>\n
Amounts of money appeared beside requests.<\/p>\n
My hands became numb as I read.<\/p>\n
People were paying Dererick.<\/p>\n
They requested particular photographs.<\/p>\n
Particular arrangements.<\/p>\n
Certain kinds of samples.<\/p>\n
Certain conditions.<\/p>\n
He quoted prices.<\/p>\n
He negotiated.<\/p>\n
He confirmed appointments.<\/p>\n
The language was coded often enough that I could not understand all of it, but there was no ambiguity about one fact.<\/p>\n
This was a business.<\/p>\n
The black bag was equipment.<\/p>\n
The notebook was a record.<\/p>\n
And I was not his wife in these communications.<\/p>\n
I was inventory.<\/p>\n
I kept scrolling.<\/p>\n
A message from two days earlier contained my name.<\/p>\n
Not a code.<\/p>\n
Anna.<\/p>\n
I stopped.<\/p>\n
The sender asked whether Anna was ready.<\/p>\n
Dererick had replied that I was close.<\/p>\n
The customer then asked about something called Graduation Services.<\/p>\n
I read the phrase twice.<\/p>\n
Graduation Services.<\/p>\n
It sounded absurdly harmless.<\/p>\n
Like a school photographer or catering package.<\/p>\n
Then I saw Dererick\u2019s response.<\/p>\n
He wrote that I was almost ready.<\/p>\n
He expected to begin the final phase soon.<\/p>\n
My fingers went ice cold on the keyboard.<\/p>\n
Final phase.<\/p>\n
A second message followed.<\/p>\n
The customer asked whether permanent access would become available afterward.<\/p>\n
Dererick answered that details were still being arranged.<\/p>\n
I stared at those words.<\/p>\n
Permanent access.<\/p>\n
I looked toward the dark bedroom doorway.<\/p>\n
For the first time since he left, I understood something with complete certainty.<\/p>\n
The danger was not over because Dererick was traveling.<\/p>\n
Whatever he had been doing to me was progressing toward something.<\/p>\n
And according to the messages, I was almost ready.<\/p>\n
I did not call the police immediately. That decision would trouble me later, but at three in the morning, fear did not arrange itself neatly enough for good decisions. I … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13667,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13643\/revisions\/13667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}