Page 19 of Coming Home for Fall 2
But even as she went through these assurances with herself after Sasha left the room, Mallory wasn’t feeling any better. She spent the rest of that day pouting around the house and avoiding every other person who was currently staying there. She went to bed early, telling her mom she wasn’t hungry when Callie mentioned something about dinner, and had a restless night.
Early the next day, she woke up to an eerily quiet house. It was before nine, but still she was the only person home. In the kitchen, she found a note from her mother, letting her know that she, David, and Sasha went to the farmer’s market.
Meet us later if you want! You can take your dad’s car.
-Mom
Mallory put the note back on the counter and sighed with relief. She was actually really happy to have the house to herself. Sasha’s words had only sunk in more deeply overnight, and shewas starting to question her parents. Her momhadkept the truth about Sasha from Mallory and her siblings, which was definitely a pretty major thing to lie about. If she was fine with being evasive about something that important, then what else might she be hiding?
If there was something her parents were keeping a secret, Mallory was determined to find out for herself. And her search began in her father’s office, where she’d been sleeping. She had this sickening feeling in her gut that the best place to start looking for clues was in her dad’s desk, since she’d always thought it was a little weird that he planned these long, lavish trips to go on—without inviting his wife. Mallory never would’ve admitted this suspicion out loud, but it was what drove her to dig through the drawers of his desk and open his laptop.
The screen prompted her to put in a password.
“Shoot.” She sat down in his wheely chair and tried the first two passwords that came to mind—her birthday and Ariel’s birthday. Neither of those were correct. Next, she tried her parents’ anniversary, then Taylor’s birthday, and finally, the dates of the five different times the San Francisco 49ers had won the Superbowl. No dice.
“C’mon, dad,” she muttered to herself. “I thought you were bad with computers. Who told you to make a better password?”
Probably Taylor, she thought bitterly. He was the one who helped his parents set up their email accounts ten years back, and he was always the most tech-savvy of the family. After her next password attempt, she was locked out for ten minutes. She swore under her breath and got up from the desk. She hadn’t found anything even remotely damning in the drawers, and her failed efforts were starting to make her anxious. It didn’t help that the lock screen on the computer felt like it was judging her for trying to break into her father’s computer. The warningmessage was in angry red font and the countdown clock for when she could try again seemed to be going too slow.
“This is madness.” She laughed at herself. “My parents aren’t keeping secrets. Sasha just wanted to get the attention off herself.” To underline her point, Mallory walked out of the office and went to grab herself a cup of coffee. She was going to abandon her search—it wouldn’t likely lead to anything anyway. If she wanted to use her free time to dig into someone’s private life, it should be Sasha’s, whom she now trusted less than ever.
She stood in the kitchen alone, sipping her coffee and trying to bring her anxieties down. Her emotions were running rampant, pulling her in many different directions. There was guilt, which was trying to drag her down. Then a criminal sort of excitement that was trying to lift her up. Her fear over what truths she might find was tugging her one way, and the need to know if her parents were hiding something was yanking her the other way. She felt like a rag doll being fought over by two children. If she didn’t calm down soon, she was going to risk falling to pieces.
“Get a grip,” she told herself, taking another big swig of her coffee and heading back down the hall. Maybe if she could learn something about Sasha or the women’s shelter she would feel better. She nervously sat back down at the desk and waited until she could put a new password in. Seconds before the countdown ended, she spotted a sticky note stuck to the far right edge of the desk. She plucked it from the surface and laughed. “Oh dad. Taylor would be so mad if he knew you put all your important passwords on a piece of paper right next to your computer.”
She waited the rest of the ten minutes, then carefully typed in David’s computer password, which had nothing to do with his anniversary or his children’s birthdays. It was the name of his childhood dog, Benny, and the numbers 1-9 in chronologicalorder. The computer chirped and she was given access to her dad’s account.
“Yes!”
She looked at the folders on his desktop, but didn’t see any labels that stood out to her, which did give her a bit of relief. A part of her was still worried she was going to stumble onto something she wasn’t ready to face. Thankfully, everything looked fairly standard—his folders were mostly work related or vacation related. On a whim, she opened a folder labeled ‘Retirement’ and saw a bunch of official looking files regarding her father’s 401K and the like. She immediately felt guilty for having doubted her father and clicked out of the window. She let the mouse hover over his folder for Dubai but ended up not clicking on it. It was likely full of trip itineraries and receipts, and she didn’t actually suspect that her dad was up to anything on these trips. If he had been traveling alone in order to carry out some illicit affair, he would’ve been way more inconspicuous about the trips, right? Not to mention, he always came back from the trips with hundreds of photos that he insisted on showing to the entire family whenever his kids were in town.
That just wasn’t the behavior of a cheater.
So, instead of going through that folder, she opened a new browser tab and typed ‘women’s shelters in northern California’ into the search bar.
A long list of varied results came up. Mallory exhaled and realized she was going to have to really go down the rabbit-hole. She sat back in her dad’s fancy leather chair and nodded. “Alright then. Let’s do this.”
Mallory reached for her coffee cup, eyes focused on the first link at the top of the search results, and gripped the hot ceramic handle with just two of her fingers. Her knuckles pressed hard against the mug, burning her skin and causing herhand to involuntarily jerk—sending a very full cup of hot coffee all over her dad’s laptop.
“Oh no!” She yelled and got to her feet, but before she could grab the laptop and flip it over to pour the liquid out, the device died and the screen went black.
*
“No, no, you’re not listening to me.” Mallory had been on hold for twenty minutes, and her nerves were making it impossible for her to sit still. She paced in front of the massive window on the Western side of her dad’s office, where she could watch to see if her parents pulled into the driveway. “I can’t bring the laptop in. It’s not mine, it’s my dads, and I don’t want him to know that I spilled coffee all over it. If he comes home and finds his computer missing, he’s going to think it was stolen or something. That’s why I need you to send someone to my house. It says on your website that you do home visits!”
“Yes, I understand that,” said the woman who had kept Mallory waiting for so long. “But we only have one tech guy who does house calls, and he’s working with someone else right now.”
“Right, I know. And normally I wouldn’t be so pushy, but I need someone to come look at this laptop as soon as possible. It’s my dad’s work computer, which means I think it was given to him through his company. It’s nice and probably really expensive, and he might have to turn it back in when he retires in six months! If it’s ruined though, they might make him pay for it, and who knows what something like this costs!”
“I could probably give you an estimate if you told me the brand and model number,” the woman said. “Would that help?”
“What? No. You’re not getting it. I can’t afford to replace the laptop. Even if I could, that doesn’t solve the problem of all my dad’s documents going missing! I need someone to comeand fix this computer before it completely dies on me. That’s assuming it hasn’t died already.” She groaned as she looked at the tented laptop sitting on her dad’s desk. Some of the coffee had dripped out, but she knew there was still a lot inside, mucking up all the delicate little parts.
“I just don’t know if we’re going to be able to send someone out to you today.”
“Then what am I supposed to do? Is there a way for me to get the coffee out myself?”
“I don’t know anything about electronics. I’m just the person who answers the phone.”
