It took one moment to break trust and a lifetime of work to rebuild it. I really thought Candace and I had shared a connection at the mall today. United over fashion, related over decor. Retail therapy! She even let me snap a selfie of us raising our banana-mango-kale smoothies, as if toasting the camera. I think she even smiled! We had started over, lemony fresh.
My gait was perky when I entered my bedroom with its stiff avocado-green wallpaper, the kind your grandmother would have picked out when she bought her first house in the 1940s. Trails of mustard-yellow flowers climbed in distressed rows where the sun chewed away at the paper. The scent of hardcover books and dust lingered in the fabric of the walls, telling stories that only ghosts remembered.
After our rejuvenating outing, I yearned for companionship. Friendship. I even felt more like myself, my face made up and hair curled. It felt good to feel pretty again, existent, alive. Picking up my phone, I stared at the black screen. It was time, time to free-fall back into society. Modern society, that is, where face-to-face human interaction was as rare as a monkey sighting in the city. Now, we all lived inside our phones, where our deepest human connections were tethered to our internet connections.
First things first, I wanted to look up that name Detective Meltzer had mentioned, the one Ben had opened up a bank account for. I found the envelope in my purse where I had scribbled it in the corner: Medea Kent. A quick Google search gave me nothing. Not a single result. Strange. The name sounded exotic on my lips. An international client, perhaps? Clearly I wouldn’t find my answers today.
My Facebook hiatus had raised a lot of concern among my so-called friends. I hadn’t posted on social media since Ben’s death, only browsed my newsfeed a time or two and searched for Candace. After all the messages offering condolences and prayers, I figured I owed my friends a status update. It was the least I could do to show I still existed in the land of the living. Ben had believed that social media was the downfall of society. According to him, it turned everyone into agoraphobic preachers with their own personal pulpits to spout whatever nonsense bubbled inside them that day. Everyone now had a cause, but only behind the safety and anonymity of a screen where there was no accountability. But even I couldn’t resist its draw. You could impulse buy, get your fake news, and make new best friends all in a matter of minutes, with just the swipe of a finger!
Initially, I joined the bandwagon to keep track of long-distance high school friends. Though maybe friends was a stretch when you hadn’t seen or spoken to someone in person in nearly two decades. But it sated that gnawing curiosity—was the head cheerleader still prettier than you (there went her tight body after three kids!), does the captain of the football team still have that charm (look at that receding hairline!)? It turned out that even the most popular, good-looking kids in high school eventually did plateau out into normalcy, with flabby arms and beer bellies and wrinkles and bad haircuts just like the rest of us. Social media was a socially acceptable form of stalking and self-validation.
Today I had decided to end my Facebook lull and publicly grieve—and publicly heal, I suppose. It was expected when everyone knew your husband had passed . . . and those who didn’t know deserved fair warning before they tagged me in marriage memes. I admit, I clicked on my Facebook app icon with trepidation. When Ben’s murder hit the news, a lot of speculation had pointed to me, the black widow. It was inevitable, since even the police had their eyes on me. The questions. The accusations. The suspicions. When a spouse ended up dead, with no enemies to speak of, people tended to point fingers at the only obvious suspect: the one with the most to gain. A multimillion-dollar insurance policy was exactly that.
Considering all this, one couldn’t blame me for hiding from public view. Wasn’t that what guilty people did—hide? But I wasn’t guilty. I just wasn’t ready to face all the backlash or sympathy. Until today, when Candace had validated me as a human, spent time and shared laughs and smoothies with me . . . and it felt so good. I needed more of that, and I knew the first step was back into the virtual world if my healing was to start gaining traction in the real world. I wasn’t the talk of the town anymore. People had moved on for lack of caring. After all, it was a well-off, middle-aged man who was murdered, not a woman or child. I’d bet most people assumed he had it coming.
As Facebook sprang to life, the first thing I noticed when I opened my account was the countless notifications, all comments about a post I apparently had made. But I hadn’t posted anything. I clicked on my profile as thousands of pixels drifted into place, forming words that made me swell with horror. Shock soaked into every part of me.
“What the hell?”
Time-stamped this afternoon, an appalling post from Harper Paris, from my very own account:
Living my best life husband free!
#deadandgone #blackwidow
The backlash went on for more than two hundred comments and a thousand angry-faced emojis, the post shared dozens of times. Complete strangers from all over the globe told me what a murdering waste of space I was, questioned the state of my soul, insisted that I should rot in jail—wait, no, apparently I deserved the electric chair for what I’d done. And eternal hellfire. Some commenters with extra time on their hands to look me up even mentioned the baby:
First she killed her child, now her husband. Child services needs to get her other kids safely away before they’re next.
I heard her two-year-old died last year. Think she killed that child too?
This woman needs to be behind bars before someone else turns up dead.
Get this #babykiller and #husbandmurderer off the streets!
The child died under suspicious circumstances. Then her husband turns up murdered. How have the police not arrested her already?
There’s nothing more dangerous than a black widow who has everyone fooled.
Comment after comment attacking my character, charging me with murder, bringing up the baby. Maybe they weren’t wrong. The two events were connected, after all. I was a killer in denial. Were my own children no longer safe with me as their mother?
The phone slipped from my fingers, landing soundlessly on the mattress. I stifled a sob, but I couldn’t hold it back. The whole world hated me, despised me, called me a murderer. I could only imagine what the cops would think when they saw this. Because most certainly they would. And it would raise a whole slew of questions I couldn’t answer. About Ben. About the baby’s death—and the details of what had actually happened. I could never let that get out.
I inhaled a steadying breath. Smell a flower, blow out a candle.
Calm yourself. Don’t panic. Just think.
Maybe I could fix this. They were just strangers, after all. Who cared what they thought of me? And yet I suddenly understood why teens were attempting suicide over social media bullying.
Smell a flower, blow out a candle.
I grabbed the phone and reopened the app, finding the post at the top of my feed. I clicked the corner icon to delete it, expecting the action to erase the hurt as well. A refresh later and it was gone—whoosh—into cyberspace. But the hurt was still there. No, it wasn’t hurt. It was anger that burned into my skin. Hatred for the person who did this. I’d already lost so much. Where my heart once lived was now an empty cavity, as if you could reach inside me and feel nothing but cool, damp air. Who would want to break what was already broken?
No one came to mind, no one who hated me this much to pose as me and write something so evil. Had some anonymous scammer hacked into my account for fun, or was it personal, done by someone with access to my phone? I knew one thing—yes, this was personal. And that left only one person who could have done it. Who would have done it.
Candace. She had motive and means.
The motive: She hated me, for one. I was the thorn in her side, and the feeling was mutual.
The means: I never kept track of my phone. I always left it sitting around, or sometimes even let Elise play Angry Birds or Escape Room on it. Candace could have easily grabbed it and posted to my account since I didn’t password protect my phone. Ben had often warned me about that. What if your phone gets stolen? he’d said a dozen times. I hadn’t listened to Ben back then, and now I regretted shrugging him off. Never again would he warn me about the dangers of not password protecting my phone. Never again would I get the chance to tell him he worried too much, or anticipated the worst in people.
When would every thought stop leading back to Ben?
Focus.
The post was made sometime around my shopping trip with Candace. I couldn’t be sure about the exact time we left, but it was close enough. My phone had definitely been with me in the car and at the mall, in my purse the whole time. And Candace had a secret ability, a superhuman power to commit wrongs without guilt. I first noticed it when I caught her wearing a ring she had stolen. She didn’t think I had seen, or maybe deniability was a game for her. Whatever the case, she proudly wore that ring with a bold lack of remorse. If she could effortlessly pilfer jewelry, how much easier was it to borrow my phone and post something terrible? And just when we were starting to get along . . .
I couldn’t imagine why Candace would want to hurt me to this extent. Sure, she came across a bit cold and aloof. But this was sociopathic. I needed to confront her about it, but I didn’t know how to outsmart her and catch her in a lie. Without proof, I had nothing but my word against hers.
Sneaking down the hall toward Candace’s bedroom, I stood by the door, which was cracked open, and listened. It was quiet inside, nothing but the occasional ruffle of pages. As I knocked, the door swung in, giving me full view of Candace eating chips in bed, a copy of Us Weekly magazine in hand. I cringed at the thought of all those greasy crumbs making their way into her wrinkled sheets.
She barely offered me a glance, her eyes remaining fixed on a page littered with pictures and celebrity gossip.
“Can I speak with you a moment?” I asked.
She groaned and glanced up, only her blue eyes visible above the magazine’s horizon. “What’s up?”
I hadn’t considered how to word this without blowing things up. I figured the simpler, the better. “Did you post something from my Facebook account?”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Why would I do that? I don’t even have a Facebook account.” There was no surprise in her eyes. No reaction at all.
“I didn’t ask if you posted from your account. I asked if you posted from my account.” The narrow glare she gave showed her clear dislike for my interrogation methods.
Closing the magazine and tossing it down, she cocked her head and smirked. “No, I did not post from your account. I’m not some vengeful teenager who uses social media to passive-aggressively launch an attack on a girl who stole my boyfriend, or whatever. I’m not into drama, Harper.”
She picked up her magazine and buried her face back in it. Conversation over, apparently.
“I never said it was drama. I just asked if you posted something.”
“I can only assume it’s drama, or else you wouldn’t be accusing me of doing it.”
My face warmed with embarrassment. “It wasn’t an accusation. It was just a question. Someone posted something from my account, and the only person who could have accessed my phone lives in this house.”
“Maybe one of the kids did it. I always see Elise on your phone.”
I shook my head. “This isn’t something they would post. Plus it was posted when we were at the mall today. My phone was with me the whole time . . . and you were with me the whole time.”
“So you think I would be that crazy to steal your phone while I’m with you? I have a life, Harper, and petty Facebook crises aren’t part of it. Are you sure you didn’t post whatever it is so that you could make me look bad to Lane?” She lowered the magazine and raised her eyebrows at me.
“What? That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it really? Because ever since you met me you’ve been trying to break me and Lane up. Clearly you’re out to get me, and I wouldn’t put it past you to frame me so you can cry to Lane about what a mean girl I am.” She rolled her hands into tiny fists, twisting them under her eyes, the universal sign for crying like a baby. Then she stopped and observed me, hard and cold, and I observed the floor, hard and cold. “But I’m not that easy to scare, Harper. I’ve dealt with way worse than you before.”
This was it, the beginning of the end. No more playing house, no rewind, no more shopping trips and selfie pics. We were now sworn enemies. I was speechless. And afraid. Something about the way she had said it shook me. This was not a woman I wanted to mess with . . . but she was also not a woman I wanted my brother chained to.
“Are we done here?” Candace’s gaze roved over me, unraveling me with her eyes. She sensed I was weak, and she preyed on that.
“Yeah, we’re done.” I nodded and left, but I had dealt with way worse too. As I shut the door behind me, I could have sworn I heard her mutter, “Black widow.”
Like I said, it was only just beginning.