Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the MachineTwo weeks later, sitting at a small kitchen table in my parents’ suburban house in Plano, I finally plugged the iPad into power.
The screen flickered to life, asking for a four-digit passcode. I frowned, tapping in our anniversary date—nothing. Our old dog’s birthday—nothing. On a whim, I tried the birth year of Jason’s mother.
Unlock successful.
I let out a dry, humorless laugh. Of course. Jason’s world had always revolved around maternal approval and outward appearances.
At first, the device opened to standard work emails, PDF architectural blueprints, and contractor invoices for the house remodel. Everything looked boring, respectable, and thoroughly mundane—the digital footprint of a dependable, hardworking corporate project manager.
Then I clicked on the cloud-synced photo library and cached browser history.
My thumb hovered over a folder labeled Personal/Archive. It was password-protected, but a secondary prompt linked directly to his iCloud keychain flashed on the screen: Use TouchID or master password? I typed in the master passcode I had discovered in his office notebook months ago.
The folder unlocked.
What tumbled out onto the screen made my breath catch in my throat.
There were hundreds of photos, but none of them were of Amber Collins.
There were pictures of a woman I had never seen before—dark hair, bright hazel eyes, laughing on the balcony of a high-rise condo in downtown Dallas that I had never visited. There were restaurant receipts, romantic weekend getaways booked in Austin and San Antonio, and text message screenshots dating back three full years—spanning the entire duration of our relationship, right through our engagement, and up to the week of our wedding.
Amber hadn't been the great lost love standing between us. Amber was just a casual distraction—a reckless indulgence he had picked up during wedding week because he knew she was weak, insecure, and easy to manipulate.
The real life, the real relationship, the real house—was built with someone else entirely.
Her name, according to an airline boarding pass screenshot nestled in a subfolder, was Chloe Vance.
And as I scrolled further down, reading the property purchase agreements and joint bank statements hidden deep within the encrypted files, I realized something that made my blood run instantly cold.
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The brick house north of Dallas—the one I had poured thirty thousand dollars of my premarital savings into for the down payment, the one my parents had chipped in an extra twenty thousand for—wasn't just legally tied to our courthouse marriage.
It was co-owned by Chloe Vance.
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