“Addie said something about text messages.Ourtext messages. I suppose there could’ve been something in there to convince him.”
“Let me see your phone.”
After navigating to my thread with Addie, I handed it over, and Trey scrolled through.
“You haven’t communicated since after you got shot, when she sent you a few texts to check in…that you ignored,” he added pointedly.
“I had bigger things on my mind.”
“Then consider me confused.”
I laughed. “That makes two of us. If these texts are the reason for Sutton’s withdrawal, we’re clearly missing something.”
“What if…” Trey trailed off as his fingers went to work on the keys. His eyes took on that glazed-over expression he often wore when his mind was working faster than his hands could. Like he was a dog that caught a scent. Several maps of the area popped up, as well as a dialogue box and some other information I didn’t understand. Trey grabbed my phone, tapped around on the screen until he found what he was looking for, then typed something into the box. While the system loaded whatever he’d demanded of it, he grabbed a cable and connected my phone.
A new window appeared, this one full of little folders labeled with things like “Cache,” “Contacts,” and “Media.”
“What’s all that?” I asked.
“All the data from your phone. I have an inkling about what happened, but if we’re going to prove it, I need to dump yours and run checks.”
“Care to share with the class?”
He smirked but didn’t answer, instead continued to tap away at keys, windows popping up and disappearing seemingly at random. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of this shit.
“Have you noticed your phone battery has been draining faster than normal? Or any weird clicking sounds when you’re on a call?”
My brows drew together, considering. “Actually, yeah. Both of those things. How’d you know that?”
After a few more keystrokes, another window similar to the one with all of my phone data opened on the screen.
Trey grinned. “Gotcha.” Then he turned to me. “So I’m pretty sure Addie cloned your phone.”
I snorted a laugh. “No way.”
“What do you mean, ‘no way’? I’m telling you this is what happened.”
“How would she even do that? I haven’t been alone with her for ages, and she never had unsupervised access to my phone—” I stopped midsentence as something occurred to me. “Holy shit. When I was in the hospital. That day you saw her running out? She was in my room when I woke up.”
“Probably when she did it, then.”
Propping my elbows onto the desk in front of me, I raked my fingers down my face, mind swirling. If she cloned my phone all those months ago, before I’d even officially rejected her,wellbefore anything with Sutton happened…
It appearedeveryonehad been right.
I felt like a fucking moron for ignoring it so long too. Maybe if I’d just listened to literally anyone in my family when they explained they thought she was off her rocker, that she was off her rocker because she wasin love with me, maybe I could’ve spared Sutton this mess.
“What does this have to do with texts?”
“By cloning your phone, she had access to everything you did on your device. Texts, calls, emails—everything. But the clone she had also acted as a duplicate of your device. Think of it like being able to correspond via text from both your phone and iPad. Two separate devices linked to the same account, or in this case, likely the IMEI.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He waved me off. “It’s not important. Whatisimportant is that, because her device is an exact replica of yours, it’s alsocapable of sending and receiving messages on your behalf. But since you have no record of them, I’d be willing to bet she was communicating with a different—” He cut off abruptly, noticing my eyes had glazed over. “Okay, I’m boring you. The point is, on the surface, these text messages she claims to havelooklike they came from you, but she was the one sending them. Staging these conversations to make it look like something was happening when it wasn’t.”
“And whatever was included in those messages hurt Sutton enough that she couldn’t even look at me earlier.”
“Exactly. So now that I know this exists, I can work on retrieving all the data and proving none of it originated from your legitimate device.”
