I was mostly just noting, in some small, dry part of my brain, that this was a better photo than I'd expected for the light. Then, I set the camera on the passenger seat and started the truck and pulled out of the brush and back onto the access road. His name was Brent. He worked in her department, or adjacent to it. Some project coordination role where they'd been in the same orbit for about a year.
I'd met him once at a company picnic. He'd had a firm handshake and a good smile, and had said something forgettable about how great Holly was to work with. I'd said, "Thanks." for some reason, like it was a compliment to me. She called these weekends her spa trips. Spa weekends.
Her and her best friend Amber decompressing from the grind. A little self-care. Back Sunday night. Seven of them in 10 months. Seven.
I drove home with the photos on the camera and the camera on the seat beside me, and thought about what I still needed before I could actually move. The photos were proof of the affair. They weren't proof of the cover story and who helped run it. They weren't proof of dates and patterns. They were the end of a chain, and I needed the rest of the chain to come with it.
I thought about the iPad. That's where this actually started. That was 2 weeks ago, and that was the moment when something I'd been half sensing and mostly ignoring became a thing I couldn't look away from anymore. The cabin, the camera, the 40 minutes in the dark, all of it started with a dead iPad and my wife asking me to wipe it before she donated it. She left it on the kitchen counter on a Saturday morning with a post-it stuck to the front.
Won't turn on. Can you wipe it before I drop it off? I work for a cable company. I run fiber installs, troubleshoot home networks, occasionally do things to equipment that the manual says shouldn't be done. The point is, a tablet that won't turn on is not a complicated problem.
I plugged it into the charger on my workbench in the garage and walked back inside and drank most of my coffee before I went back to check on it. It turned on. Dead battery. That was the whole problem. I left it on the charger, came back in an hour, and it was sitting there at 63% with the lock screen up.
I entered the PIN. Holly used the same four digits for everything. Our anniversary month and year, which I was now finding darkly funny, and it opened right up. I was going to do a factory reset. That was the job.
But it was connected to the charger and I figured I'd let it charge to 100 while I did a quick backup check. Just to make sure there wasn't anything on it that needed to come off first. So I connected it to my phone's hotspot and let it pull updates and sync. It synced her messages. Not current messages.