She asked him if he’d volunteer to help out in her husband’s used bookstore. She said it was because he needed help—he worked nonstop—but the more they talked the more it became clear to Jake that Alice wanted someone to keep an eye on her husband.

“He’s found someone younger, in New York,” she said, her voice flat.

“How do you know?”

“I saw the messages on his phone, and then suddenly they stopped appearing. He must have another way of getting in touch with her now, probably something in the store. You could help me find out if it’s still going on.”

“Okay,” Jake had said. “But are we pretending we don’t know each other?”

“That would be for the best. Give him a different name, he’ll never know.”

“What if people around here recognize me?”

“They won’t, Jake. You look totally different.”

She’d been right. He hadn’t been recognized by anyone, nor had he seen anyone he recognized. The bank had been two towns over, and the patrons from there didn’t seem to frequent Ackerson’s Rare Books. He went by John Richards now, and he liked the new identity. He liked Bill, too, for what it was worth, even though he did eventually find proof that he was involved with someone in New York. It turned out they’d been sending private messages through the store’s rarely used Twitter account.

Jake had stumbled upon it by accident after going onto the store’s computer to look up a health condition. He’d been experiencing a strange twitching in his left arm recently, and he’d put in the letters T and W when Twitter popped up, landing him on the bookstore’s page. He’d never seen much of Twitter—Bill was the one who maintained it—and he noticed that there was a message icon on the top menu bar. He clicked on it, and there it was, several back-and-forth messages between Bill and a Grace McGowan in New York. They weren’t overtly sexual, but they were intimate. Most messages ended with miss you from Bill, and xoxo from Grace. There was very little information on Grace McGowan’s actual Twitter page—it seemed that maybe it existed only so that she could private-message with Bill—but there was one picture of her, and she was very young. Early twenties, maybe.