“You need to access the back end of these apps. We have legal safeguards in place. It’ll be discreet. You won’t get in trouble. I want you to find this name.” He showed Sy the list of apps, the name. Sy studied all of it for a moment on his monitor, looked back up at Tom quizzically.

“You want me to scrounge around dating apps?” And then he remembered whom he was speaking to and he quickly tilted his head back down, licking his lips and tapping his fingers on the desk table.

“You signed an NDA when you started working here. Remember that. Email me the results by tonight.” He left the door open, so Sy would have to eventually get up and close it himself. And he walked out of the offices as quickly as he could, before anyone else tried to catch him and begin conversing, tried to rope him into staying any longer. When he stepped outside it was snowing.

2

VERA

Present day

The city is slick with heat, sticky with it, summer suddenly, cruelly, pushing spring out of the way though it’s only mid-June. As I walk, it’s like I’m moving through a dense fog, the humidity clouding over me in sagging plumes. Sweat trickles down the nape of my neck. I wonder, passively, if I should have lathered sunscreen on, gobs of it, like my parents used to put on me when I was a child. You could fry an egg on the sidewalk, as they say.

I like it, though, the heat, the unrelenting nature of it. It feels like a gritty balm somehow, like I’m exfoliating the truth I had just learned, scrubbing its ugly surfaces. I step back into the sunlight after walking in the shade of some buildings for a few blocks, feel the sun beat down on my shoulders. There’s not a cloud in the sky.

I had checked what I’d found, what I thought I’d discovered, once, twice, three times. For a sustained moment I’d believed that what I was experiencing was some kind of narcissistic transference, that I had become so indistinguishably intertwined with Odilie that I was suddenly seeing myself in her.

But there was no doubt now. She knew me. At first, I wondered if she had been trying to signal to him, to let him know she knew he was cheating on her by posting these passive-aggressive pictures that mimicked mine so precisely. But it went further than that, much further. Months before I had even started talking to Tom, she had been looking at my images, following my every move. And for what? Why? None of this could be a coincidence. But he had found me on that app. He hadn’t been following me himself. Right?