Hey, it's Ben. Leave a message.
I didn't leave one. I hung up and called again.
Voicemail.
So I'd texted him instead, my fingers clumsy on the small keyboard:
I found Ryan's phone. We need to talk.
That was twenty minutes ago. He still hadn't responded.
Now I was driving home through streets I barely registered, the phone charging in the cupholder next to me, Ryan's cracked Maui smile facing up like an accusation. The late afternoon light was already fading into that flat January gray that made everything look washed out and tired. I kept glancing at my ownphone on the passenger seat, waiting for it to light up with Ben's name, but it never did.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter and turned onto our street, where the houses all had their porch lights on and families were sitting down to dinner, living lives that still made sense.
Our house was dark.
I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a moment, staring at the front door. Then I grabbed both phones and the manila envelope with Ryan's things and went inside.
The house smelled stale, like an old casserole and the faint chemical tang of cleaning products I'd used to scrub out the Pyrex. I dropped my keys on the counter and emptied the envelope beside them—his wallet, the watch, the wedding ring. Ryan's phone sat in my other hand, the cracked screen dark.
I stood there in the kitchen, my mind racing.
You were right. This ends tonight.
What had Ben been right about?
Maybe it was money. Ryan could have been in financial trouble — a bad investment, a loan he’d taken out without telling me. Ben worked jobs all over town. He knew who paid late, who borrowed too much, who was dodging calls from suppliers. If Ryan had gotten himself into something messy, Ben would’ve heard the whispers before anyone else.This ends tonight.Maybe it meant Ryan was finally going to fix it. Pay someone back. Come clean.
Or maybe it was work. A project going sideways. A client threatening to sue. Ryan had been stressed lately, hadn't he? Coming home later, distracted during dinner. Ben would have told him to handle it, to face it head-on.
That had to be it. Something professional and fixable.
But even as I built these explanations, there was another possibility sitting in the corner of my mind. The one I wouldn't look at directly.
No.
Not that.
My ribs felt cinched, breath snagging halfway down like it didn’t want to stay inside me. I needed to move. To do something. Anything. Standing here in the kitchen with Ryan's things spread across the counter and that thought sitting in the corner of my mind was going to split me open.
I grabbed his phone and started looking.
I went deeper this time. I started with the photos, scrolling back weeks, then months, looking for faces I didn't recognize, places I'd never been. The Recently Deleted folder. Call logs going back as far as the phone would let me. I Googled "how to find hidden apps on iPhone" on my own phone and followed the instructions, swiping through screens, checking settings I'd never opened before.
Nothing.
Everything was clean. Too clean, or just clean enough that I couldn't tell the difference anymore.
So I moved to the rest of the house.
His home office came first. I stood in the doorway for a second, taking in the desk the way I always did when I was looking for something—surface first, then drawers. The charging cables, the stack of unread architecture journals, the coffee ring he'd never bothered to wipe.
His Maui stone was gone. I couldn't remember when it had stopped being there. Last week? Last month? It had just quietly stopped being there. I couldn't remember noticing.
I pulled open the desk drawers with enough force that pens and paper clips scattered across the wood floor. Bank statements, old contracts. I flipped through folders, checkedbetween pages of architectural drawings, looked for anything—receipts, notes, a phone number scrawled on a Post-it.
There was nothing.
