“What the fuck,” Hailey whispered to him. “Why would anyone do this to us?Why?”
Mack found at least a partial answer when Hailey—thorough to the very end—clicked on the weather app: the ten-day forecast for the Greater Cleveland metropolitan area in the middle of December was ninety-degree sunshine every day.
“Someone thinks this isfunny,” he said to her. “Some prick is out there somewhere laughing at how scared this will make us.”
“But from how far away?” The dark had settled around them while they scrolled through the slings and arrows of their daily exchanges, and Mabel and Gigi had eaten dry cereal for dinner and fallen asleep on the carpet in front of the TV. Mack heard the fear in Hailey’s voice, and as they scooped up the girls to take them to bed, it was all he could do not to press Mabel to his chest, to shout for Hailey to follow him and to run, screaming at the top of his lungs, out into the night.
Instead, once he had tucked Mabel in, he stood in between his daughters’ bedroom doors and spent a long time thinking again about the car and the police. But it felt important that they stay together, so when he finally did force himself to move and found Hailey in the dressing room packing a bag, he panicked.
“Where are you going?”
“Not me,we.”
“Where are we going?” As angry as he still was with her, as much as he had to believe that this whole thing was her fault, he prayed that he was still a part of herwe.
“My parents’. We can’t stay here.”
He watched as she pulled a dozen pairs of underwear from a drawer.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” She crumpled onto the carpet, and Mack did not even think to try and catch her. “But that doesn’t even help, does it? This person has been to my parents’ house, Mack—those pictures! They... He could be listening to us now—” She gestured toward the hall, where Mack had left the iPad. “I don’t... I don’t even know where to start. It’severywhere! We can’t go to a hotel because the bank account—what if they’re tracking our phones?”
“I know. I still think the police are our only option. I think we have to tell them about Rainier, that he’s doing this to you. To us.”
Hailey closed her eyes, and it made Mack’s heart beat even faster. “What?”
“We couldn’t find anything in David Rainier’s financials. He’s clean. I’m sorry, you were so upset I didn’t know how to tell you. It doesn’t mean he can’t be involved, but I don’t know how we’d prove it.”
Mack dug his fingernails into his palms. “Just call him. Call the prick and tell him you’re even, tell him to cut this the hell out, and let the firm write off the loss. Lose your job, so what. You can start over.”
“I tried that. Itriedto call him off! I’m going to lose my job anyway. He has proof that I—that I—”
Mack turned away from her. “What kind of proof?”
“I don’t know. Dennis at work got into his phone—”
“What do you mean, got into his phone?How?”
“I told you, he’s our IT. He’s a hacker. I’m—”
“And you don’t think Dennis the hacker might have something to do with the fact thatEVERY SINGLE PART OF OUR LIVEShas been hacked?”
“Dennis? Why would Dennis, who works forme...” She kept going, but Mack wasn’t listening. Hailey was speaking to him in that way that he hated most of all, like he was an imbecile, like he didn’t have a master’s and a PhD and—
“Mack? Are you even hearing me right now?”
He was fighting with everything he had not to scream her down. If he said what he was thinking, she might leave without him. She might leave without himanyway, and he realized that more than anything he didn’t want that. He let her finish. He nodded in all the right places. Of course it wasn’t Dennis the hacker who was hacking into their lives, how could Mack be so stupid as to think it might be?
And actually, he realized, even if itwereDennis, or if it were David Rainier, or Mack’s dead father, or his favorite Starbucks barista, even if he could figure out exactly who it was doing this to them, whatthen? Mack had no answer, and so, when Hailey had finished talking at him, he took out his tattered duffel bag and began to pack.
Then heunpacked, when Hailey decided that, thinking it over, they shouldn’t go anywhere. That it wasn’t safe to be out in the dead of night with two tiny kids on icy roads with probably a lunatic in hot pursuit.
They turned off the router and the Bluetooth on their phones, and then, when that didn’t feel like enough, they switched off the phones themselves. Mack kept the landline cordless in his pocket, comforted by the old-fashioned heft of it, and then—feeling a lot more scared than he ever would have admitted to—he checked the locks on all the windows and the doors. The inch-long gap he always left in his tiny office window to combat the heat of the furnace room felt like an open drawbridge, and as he tugged it closed, he knocked his marijuana plant from the windowsill. The pot smashed on the concrete, and dirt went everywhere. With the cold, judgment-filled eyes of his pioneer ancestors looking on, he grabbed the withered plant by its stem and closed the door on the mess.
Back up in the bedroom, he flicked on the fireplace and tossed the plant into it. Hailey, who was sitting on the end of the bed with Gulliver next to her, looked on wordlessly as Mack’s minuscule cannabis crop was lost to the flames. It was just about the least of his problems, but it still felt like he’d escaped from something; cultivation of controlled substances would not be on his rap sheet.
“We have to take back control of this.” Mack took in a deep breath that he hoped contained some trace of narcotic. “I know you think I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital, but I’ve got to find out what happened to that boy. It’s driving me crazy. How can I make any decisions about getting the police involved unless I know how bad it is? That kid is all I can think about.”
