The lake leans away from the steps, a shallow breath drawn and held. I keep it on my left, glass turned into a bar chart no one admits they read. The house smells like cedar and printer toner, with the ozone trace that storms leave stitched into the vents. I put my laptop on the ash desk, set a blank spreadsheet to fullscreen, and title the first tab with a small, stubborn click: Care.
“Start with hours,” I whisper to the cursor, and the mic on my burner hears me for the record. “Start with hands.”
I list the morning routines I built and then pretended were automatic: lunches staged for his early flights, dry cleaning triaged so his rook cufflinks always had a shirt to bite, donor thank-you notes drafted for him to pretend to write. I put dates in the left column and verb phrases in the right: Drove him to speech—storm night—11:40 p.m.; Stayed awake through board livestream, clipped timestamps for recap; Managed comment moderation on the Foundation’s “child-neutral” reel—two hours—deleted targeted bile.
“Who asked you to?” I murmur, playing prosecutor to myself.
“I did,” I answer, tapping the cell. “Because love should look like help.” The defensive heat in my neck cools when I add a third column: the costs. Skipped my usability interview; rescheduled my mother’s call; lost a morning to his ‘later.’
The next tab waits in gray: Money. I click, set the columns, breathe through the little chuff the lake makes against the foundation, and add the first line item: Salary differential after I left the startup. The second: Conference fees covered by me when his travel grant “lagged.” The third: Foundation gala attire—mine logged as household expense, his written off as development. I attach screenshots: the receipt with the rook watermark in the corner of the invite—branding bred to be cute.
“You benefited,” I say to the screen. “You liked the shine.”
“Yes,” I say back. “I wore the dress. I smiled at the donor who called me ‘sensible,’ and I ate the canapé that tasted like gratitude and glue.”
I drag in a folder labeled Taxes—the decoy—and a real subfolder labeled Ledgers. The cursor blinks like a metronome I didn’t set. I hear the neighbor’s drone in the distance, a small whine that has learned our windows.
I create Promises, third tab, and my hands hesitate. The smell of cedar deepens when the HVAC kicks, and it reminds me of the drawer down the hall: cotton, lavender, a onesie folded into a noun. I type the first entry with mechanical care: “We’ll talk later”—post-gala, after donor joked about “bonus clauses.” Timestamp: 00:42 behind the live-captioned toast. I link to an audio clip I made the night I learned to fear adjectives holding hands with missions.
“Define ‘later,’” I say to my own cells.
“Never,” I say, and I color the cell pale red.
The next promise: “We’ll get a place without so much glass;” the next: “We’ll revisit adoption after the pledge lands;” the next: “I’ll disable the bracelet’s outbound if it bothers you.” I place checkboxes in a column called Kept? and leave them empty. The emptiness organizes itself into an accusation.
I add one kept promise—fairness audit intact: He paid my mother’s flight after her surgery, and I mark the box. The defensive voice in my chest softens, then I force it to sit in the corner with a clipboard.
The fourth tab clicks open: Surveillance. I list the objects that became verbs—the smart speaker that never blinks, the “wellness” bracelet that confessed to his admin, the HOA drones that mapped stroller traffic like it was contraband. I add one I don’t want to: My own recorder under the tea tray. I enter Method: dual-channel; Purpose: accuracy; and I put Me in the Initiator column with the same font as Julian. The honesty tastes like copper—gross and necessary.
“Add context,” I tell myself. “Not excuses.”
I scroll to the bottom of Surveillance and write: First logged pattern predates clause discovery—cf. Panel on Digital Privacy: he asked for my phone at the coat check to ‘update maps.’ I remember the rook on the doorknob that night at the donor salon, the captions gliding under someone’s toast, To choosing less—for more of us. The rook was the joke and the warning, disguised as strategy and charm.
The printer warms with a small animal sigh. I will need to hold paper to know whether this is real. But the spreadsheet has one more task and it claws at me: the second scene beat—the one I don’t want to film.
I add a new section to Care: My failures. I type: I withheld the truth about the test strip for forty-eight hours; I scheduled the cash-clinic under an alias before speaking to him; I baited the smart-speaker exploit when I could have asked. I make a new column for Motive and write small sentences: Protection; prior pattern; fear. I add: I let “practical” become armor when he asked for “principle,” and I used silence as leverage. I don’t justify. I don’t apologize to the cells. I let the rows accuse me and I answer by keeping them.
“Say the petty ones too,” I order myself, and the keyboard accepts it. I laughed at his keynote alone in the kitchen with the volume low; I moved the rook cufflinks to the wrong drawer on purpose before a breakfast TV hit; I lied about liking that podcast because he loved that host and I wanted to starve the cult a little. The pettiness leaves a greasy taste, but it is mine, and it belongs here.
I run a SUM on Later Count in the Promises tab and watch the number climb like a heartbeat under stress. Thirty-seven. I filter to “after public announcement events” and it drops to twenty-one. I keep both numbers and I add a note: “Later” is not time; it’s a method. A micro-hook pulls at me as I type the word, because the math does too: Method preceded clause. Clause perfected method.
I lean back, spine against chair, and the house answers with a faint creak, glass acknowledging load. “Now talk like court,” I say to the room. “Short, spare.”
“Promise pattern began before I found the ‘Dependents’ folder,” I say aloud, while typing: 2019: wellness detox talk; 2020: pledge rehearsal; 2021: prenup footnote reread; 2022: bracelet gift; 2023: donor gala; 2024: blind item drafts I didn’t leak; now. I add timestamps where I have them, “approx” where I don’t, and I mark “subjective” when the memory blurs around the edges.
The lake slaps once, a mild rebuke. Somewhere down the path, a stroller wheel squeaks and someone’s dog shakes out rain, tags chiming. I think of the listserv threads where someone wrote, Reminder: child-neutral amenities are not a punishment; please store strollers indoors. I copy the phrase into Surveillance, because culture is a grid too.
I print the Promises tab first. Pages spill into the tray, warm and neat. I stack them, and the toner smell climbs into my sinuses like an old office building. I print Care, then Money, then Surveillance. Each set gets a paperclip, then a post-it with a tiny rook sketched in the corner—not homage, not fear, just a marker that the game exists even when I refuse the board.
I spread the stacks across the desk the way I used to spread sticky-notes on a lab wall. The captions on the dining room screen, left on mute after last week’s salon, loop through their gratitude refrains in the glass’s reflection. The lake makes another tiny opinion against stone. My shoulders drop a notch, and I let the defensive posture drain through my chair until my back feels like a fact.
“Read it aloud,” I tell myself. “If you can’t say it, you can’t stand by it.”
I pick up Promises and read the first page into the burner’s mic. “Item one: ‘We’ll talk later’—post-gala. Status: unkept. Consequence: insomnia, kitchen server discovery. Item two: ‘We’ll revisit adoption’—status: deferred beyond utility. Consequence: research halted, grief deferred into paperwork.”
I read Care next, the white space between bullet points filling with all the things I never called labor because I was raised to count care as the cost of being loved. “Packed go-bags for him; prepped donor bios; bought ginger candy for me and called it a snack, not a need.” My voice steadies with each line, thinner in the high register, truer in the low.
I pick up Money and say the numbers, even the ones that embarrass me: the differential I pretended didn’t matter because mine was “meaningful work,” the ways I let optics pay my rent in attention. “Food for gala prep: \(280. My consulting hour comped to Foundation: \)0. Travel where his grant lagged and I fronted: $1,362; reimbursed? No.” The numbers turn into a rhythm, and the rhythm does what rhythms do: it tells the body where to stand.
Finally, Surveillance. I say my name where it belongs. “Recorder under tea tray—initiator: me. Smart-speaker exploit—initiator: me. Bracelet data stream rerouted—initiator: me. Context: safety, documentation, pattern confirmation. Note: consent violated—both ways in smaller and larger degrees.” I don’t flinch at my own indictment; I won’t survive court if I tremble at this.
I stack the pages again and slide them into a kraft folder. My fingers find the roughness at the edges, and the texture grounds the last beat: I open a fresh save dialog and type the filename with a slow, courtroom-ready care.
marriage_audit_v1.
My hand hovers. I want to add a date. I don’t. I hit save. The cursor blinks once, small and satisfied.
“Print to offsite,” I tell the printer, and the network sighs, and I cancel it before it completes. “No,” I correct myself. “Private copy, local only. Off-network.” I pull the thumb drive from its slot, the one with the scuffed sticker that used to say recipes, a lie I earned.
I look at the four tabs glowing on my screen. The first micro-hook catches again: in Promises, I highlighted an old entry in a different color without thinking—“Let’s revisit after Hale’s daughter’s fundraiser, it’s sensitive optics,” he’d said, years before the pledge had a trademark. I didn’t know then that the fundraiser’s host had a daughter with a last name that would matter later; I only remembered the live-captioned toast and the rook cufflinks catching light.
“Donor’s daughter,” I whisper into the room, and the words taste like a door I’ve seen before in the dark.
I close my eyes and hold the edges of the kraft folder until my palms register its weight. “You don’t go to war with a diary,” I tell myself. “But you don’t go to court without one either.”
I carry the folder to the printer and press the manual feed bar. The rubber wheel squeaks. I slot one more sheet—cover page—and type on it with an old, unfriendly font: PRIVATE LEDGER — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. I don’t add my name. I don’t add his. The page comes out like a warning label for a bottle that looks like water.
In the hallway, the cedar closets exhale their clean, curated air. I pass the nursery drawer and let my knuckles brush the knob; the rook on the bedroom door stares without blinking. I put the folder in the safe behind the pantry panel, the same panel that holds the server rack that started my night work months ago. The metal is cool and certain under my fingertips.
Back at the desk, I hover the mouse over the Later Count and toggle it on and off, red, off, red. I whisper to the lake, to the screen, to the woman who will be asked—on a stand, under oath—why she stayed. “Because I believed the next later,” I say, and then I correct myself. “Because I invested in the machine that made later.”
I sit. I open a new sticky note and type the only instruction I’ll take tonight: No new evidence hunting after 10 p.m. Read ledger once. Sleep. The house clicks, the low dam works, and the captions on the silent screen loop a praise I’m allergic to now: We thank restraint. I let the words pass through me like an x-ray that shows bones I already know.
I rest my fingers on the keyboard and don’t move. The file name sits at the top edge of the screen, plain and unarguable. I ask the question that keeps the audits honest and the future from being cataloged by someone else: Does the next proof belong in court or in a drawer—and which choice preserves my why without selling my life as an exhibit?