The next morning, I drove Sofia to school like always. Her little backpack looked too bright for what she now knew about adults. When she got out of the truck, she paused, looked back, and asked in a tiny voice, “Are you mad at Mommy?”
I made myself smile. “I’m mad at grown-ups who told you to keep scary secrets.”
She nodded slowly. Then she asked, “You’re not leaving, right?”
That question stayed with me all day.
At work, I barely heard anything my foreman said. During lunch, I sat in my truck and went through the phone records on our family account. Rachel had started deleting things months ago, but not everything. There were repeated numbers, gaps in location sharing, and a pattern of “girls’ lunches” that lined up perfectly with unexplained data use near Charleston during the two weeks Sofia was supposedly only swimming and eating pancakes.
That evening, I told Rachel I had a late service call. Instead, I drove to the address printed on the grocery receipt.
It was a rental house in a newer development — neutral siding, two-car garage, toys scattered in the yard, a little plastic slide near the porch. Nothing dramatic. The banality of it made everything worse.