He stared at it blankly. “Yeah. I have a bunch of burner accounts for sources.”

“But you hadn’t seen the message?”

He shook his head. “I don’t check them that often. But that message was for me.”

X, she had called him. I guess that meant ex, which I wasn’t even sure was accurate. “What does it mean? What did Caro want you to do?”

“I can’t share that.”

“You can tell me or you can tell the cops.” I didn’t know when I’d become a cheerleader for the NYPD, first asking Theo’s father to talk to them and now offering to sic them on Ben. I just didn’t have anything else to threaten him with.

“Look, Deirdre, I would love to be able to confide in you,” Ben said. “But I don’t know whose side you’re on.”

“I’m on Caro’s side,” I said. “I don’t care about anything else.”

“Show me the message she sent you.”

It was my turn to be affronted. “Excuse me?”

“If she sent me a message, she sent one to you,” Ben said. “I need to see it.”

Reluctantly, I pulled it up on my phone. He read it silently, nodding to himself.

“So she did tell you,” he said. “That’s good. Otherwise, you wouldn’t believe me about Theo.”

“What did Caro tell you?”

Ben raised an eyebrow. “She never described the torture her husband put her through? The shit that was happening at her house?”

“Like what?”

“Did she ever mention how she had no privacy? How things would move from room to room, how her private possessions would be rearranged?”

“I only heard a little about it.”

“Caroline was afraid to tell anyone,” Ben said. “It made her sound crazy. Claiming that someone moved your shoes to the wrong shoebox makes you sound psycho. But that’s by design.”

“By design?” I repeated. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s psychological warfare,” Ben said. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts. It was a tactic perfected by the Stasi—the secret police—in East Germany. They sent officers to move things around in dissidents’ homes when they weren’t there. It was meant to disorient them, and it was a perfect way to distance them from people they cared about. Because when they told people close to them, it was dismissed as lunacy and paranoia.”

“Let me get this straight. They just moved stuff? They didn’t take things?”

“Right. Taking things gives you a legitimate crime to report. Saying a ring is missing doesn’t make you cuckoo. But saying someone came into your home and rearranged your jewelry box . . . well, how would you tell anybody that with a straight face?”

“They’d think you did it yourself and forgot.” There was an ugly logic to what he was saying.