Page 61 of This Is How It Started
“Mazel tov. Here’s to many wonderful years in your new home,” I say. “I’ve got to run. But you’ve got the keys, and the house is all yours now.”
“Thank you, Rachel. We couldn’t have gotten it without you. And though it wasn’t necessary, thank you for this.” He holds up the basket, then comes over to me and kisses the top of my head.
“Ah, shucks, it was nothing.” I try to joke this moment away, but I’m seconds away from crying and need to get out of here before I break down and make a fool of myself.
Campbell must sense it, because he lifts my chin and in a soft voice says, “I know it should’ve been you.”
For a second, I’m confused. But no, he means Josh and me. He must mean that it should’ve been us buying a home and starting the next phase of our life together. Of course that’s what he means.
“I’ve got to go, Campbell.”
“Okay.” He nods. “I’ll be over in a little bit to take a look at the pool house.”
I don’t say anything, just turn around and bolt out of there as fast as I can.
Chapter 22
Traces of a Happy Marriage
Brooke and I are back to the daily cacophony of power tools. The mystery writers are coming tomorrow, at which time Campbell will have to stop working in the pool house. For twelve thousand bucks, our guests deserve some semblance of peace and quiet. Unfortunately, it’s going to put us behind schedule on the project. Despite the hiatus, Campbell still believes he’ll finish in time for the traveling nurse.
I’m looking forward to a break from the noise but not to rooming with my stepmother. The cottage is tight for two people. And Brooke is taking the week off from work so she can get her side hustle on as a home chef, which means we’ll be tripping over each other.
Other than to show my new client a couple of houses, I don’t have a lot to do. Oh, except to clean toilets and scrub showers. I’d almost forgotten that that was part of the deal until Brooke reminded me this morning.
Luckily, we’re having the house professionally cleaned before the writers show up. Brooke has made it known to them that our bedrooms are off limits. Yesterday, upon her request, Campbell installed key locks on both our doors.
The whole thing is very strange. But I’ll give Brooke credit; she’s not the prissy little trophy wife I thought she was. The woman gets shit done. The other day, she fixed the downstairs powder room toilet to keep it from constantly running. I’ve heard her on the phone, booking the cottage and the pool house like she’s been in property management as long as I’ve been in real estate. The only difference is she’s actually making money.
Tonight, she wants me to go with her to another grief group meeting. This time it’s at Raj’s house. Everyone takes turns hosting. I haven’t decided whether to go yet. Honestly, I’m trying not to think about Josh for a while. How is it possible to miss someone so much but at the same time want to kill him?
Yesterday, I bit the bullet and deleted the Texts/Beth file. I’m not sure if it was to absolve Josh of his perfidy or to hide the evidence. I thought destroying the file would give me a sense of peace. Ironically, it had the opposite effect. I’m spending every waking hour dwelling on all the unanswered questions.
Like now, what I really want to do is find Beth Hardesty. I grab my laptop from the nightstand, close out the MLS program I’m in and turn to my trusty friend, Google.
There are more Beth Hardestys in the world than you would think. And for all I know she’s married now and goes by a different last name. I narrow my search to Beth Hardestys in the Bay Area. Since Josh and I saw her at Tino’s that time, it’s a safe assumption that she still lives here.
There are still too many to choose from, so I widen my parameters by plugging in “art” and “SFMOMA” in the search bar. At the top of the first page is a link to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is having a Calder exhibit I wouldn’t mind seeing. The rest of the pages involve links to artists that either have Beth or Hardesty in their names, none of whom appears to be her.
This isn’t working.
I decide to go the social media route. For some reason I get a strong LinkedIn vibe from her and try that first. There are lots of Beth Hardestys. And since I don’t know what she does for a living, I try to match profile pictures with the dressing room selfie. My dirty little secret is that while I purged the file, I kept the picture. It’s been more than eight years, so who knows if she looks like that anymore.
It doesn’t take long before I realize this isn’t a good use of my time. I move on to Instagram, where everyone seems to be hanging out these days. Once again, I turn up a shitload of Beth Hardestys. Apparently, it’s a very popular name. Again, without knowing her occupation, hobbies, or associations, it’s one of those proverbial needle-in-a-haystack situations. I consider TikTok but wouldn’t know what to do once I got there, so I fall back on the oldie but goodie. Facebook.
Like everything else I’ve tried, there’s a ton of Beth Hardestys. I search for Beth Hardestys from Cal, hoping that it’s somewhere in her profile. When that doesn’t net me much, I try Beth Hardesty, Cal and Bay Area. Also a bust. I go back to the list of Beth Hardestys and try to match the face I now know by heart with the other Beths’ profile pictures. There’s one that looks like a match. But when I click on her information, I see she’s an alum of Ole Miss and lives in Natchez.
Back to the list.
There’s a Beth Hardesty Jones who has a Cal bear as her profile picture. Bingo, I think I’ve found her. But when I click over to her profile page, her birthdate shows her to be fifty-two and her last profile pic is of an African American woman.
Ugh, do I have to hire a private investigator?
In a burst of sheer brilliance and then pure trepidation of what I might find, I hop over to Josh’s profile page. He set it up long before we were married. But as far as I know, he only used it sporadically in recent years to post pictures of his architecture projects.
Sure enough, there’s not much here. The last thing he posted was four years ago, a picture of us in front of the Western Wall during a vacation to Israel. I click over to his list of friends. There’s only about five hundred. Toward the bottom of the list is good old Beth Hardesty. I hover over her name and then do something really stupid. I sign out of Facebook as me and sign back in as Josh. Luckily, he used the same password for just about everything. I go straight to the messenger icon at the top of the page and think of Ashley Birnbaum and her soon-to-be ex-husband Eli.
When I finally called her, she told me the whole sordid story. Not only did Eli have a porn problem, but he used Facebook to hook up with women who shared his particular proclivities. They spent their days on Facebook Messenger verbally reenacting the Kama Sutra. Ash snuck into the twins’ bedroom in the middle of the night, broke into Eli’s account and read every filthy thing he and these women ever wrote, then summarily vomited her guts up.
