Back at the computer, I deleted my user name and punched in his. I hadn’t had much luck since the last time he changed his password, but I gave it a shot. The computer screen denied me access. AOL dumped me back to the welcome page and I tried again. I entered “secret”—that didn’t work. I gave “davegallagher” a shot. Nothing. I even tried “DaniHale,” to see if he paid some sort of tribute to me by having my name as his password . . . but no access.

Dave was careful and changed his password frequently. It hadn’t been hard to get his password originally; I just waited until his computer was left on after he had been working on it. Whenever he jumped into the shower, all I had to do was go into the hard drive and click on Keychains, and all the passwords stored on the computer popped up. The computer just had to be on and Dave would have had to log in when he first powered it up. People never log off after each time they use their computer.

I hadn’t been able to get on and check his account for the past month. Having no e-mail access to Dave’s account had actually made it pretty peaceful for me. I hadn’t checked his e-mail four or five times a day the way I usually did. But I did have the sour satisfaction of knowing he couldn’t dial up Amy Robbins.

I turned off the computer and picked up the phone. I dialed Verizon voice mail and punched in his voice mail number, then his voice mail password, which hadn’t been hard to get. I had just waited until he checked his messages and then when he went to the bathroom I hit “redial.” The LCD readout on the phone showed his code, complete with all the pound signs.

He’d changed the code. I couldn’t get it.

Shit.

TEN

TEN

The cat box smell woke me up. Wrinkling my nose, I opened one eye and could see Lucy sitting inches from my head purring contentedly. Of course she was purring and very content—she’d just done something horrendous in the litter box.

“Jesus, Lucy.” She flicked her tail in response. I could smell the flowery perfume of the litter on her tail. The combination curdled my stomach.

Lying immobilized, I stared up at the ceiling, my eyelids like sand-paper raking across my corneas with every blink. I’m single and alone, I thought. I have no emergency contact person for when I go to the doctor. Dave had been my emergency person. Now I’d have to correct that. The nurses would know that Dave had cheated on me. They’d talk about me behind their glass partition.