Arietta reasoned that Fred kept his passwords on a notes app on his phone, just as so many people did. To get into it, they had to use facial recognition software. Shannon felt queasy, watching her mother flash her father’s phone screen in front of his face. But of course, Fred was none the wiser about what was going on in front of him.
All at once, they were in.
“I hate this,” Shannon breathed, following her mother back to the veranda.
“I hate it too, honey,” Arietta said, squeezing Shannon’s wrist.
“Are you sure you don’t know what the letter is about?” Shannon asked.
Arietta nodded. “I don’t know a thing. If I did, I would tell you. I promise you that.”
Shannon wanted to ask her mother about the nature of marriage. She wanted to know whether her mother and father had kept secrets from each other their entire lives, or if the secrets had built up over the years. But instead, she watched quietly over her mother’s shoulder as her mother went through the Notes app, searching for numbers and letters and codes. It didn’t take long to find a subfolder titled “PW.” “Here we go,” Arietta said, her eyes widening.
Upstairs, Arietta and Shannon hunched over Fred’s computer.
“I thought maybe we could start with his email,” Shannon explained. “It’s probably connected to his calendar.”
The third password on the Notes app was the email password: 1234MassState. It felt anticlimactic. Shannon considered telling her mother that she’d tried all kinds of passwords, ones that had to do with their family and their birthdays, but she thought better of it. This was delicate enough as it was.
Inside Fred’s email, they found a pileup of nearly five hundred emails since his stroke. Some of them, incredibly, were from people who’d actually heard about the stroke and wanted to reach out to see if he was all right. Those headings said things like “Just checking in!” And “Get well soon!” They were ludicrous. But for more than an hour, Arietta and Shannon scanned through them, looking for clues.
Shannon groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Dad’s job sounds so boring,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “If I have to see another graph about financial outlooks, I’ll scream.”
Arietta grimaced. “We should eat something.”
They went downstairs and popped cinnamon bagels into the toaster, then refilled the coffee pot. It was an overcast day, and seagulls squawked and swooped overhead. Rather than go back upstairs to Fred’s desktop, they decided to log into his work email from Shannon’s laptop, and they sat on the veranda, scanning through more emails while eating.
It wasn’t till an email sent in late April—three days after Fred’s stroke—that they discovered anything of value. It was from a name Shannon recognized—Professor Tom Michaelson of Yale. It read: Let’s catch up when you’re here next week.
“Next week,” Shannon read aloud, her head pounding. This meant that her father had had plans to come to Yale during the first week of May. But if her father was coming to New Haven, wouldn’t she have known? Shannon checked her own calendar—where she kept dutiful notes to keep up with the demands of grad school. There were calendar reminders for assignments, lab reports, lab closures, dinners with friends (which she probably canceled due to Fred’s stroke), and various other campus reminders. But there was no note anywhere indicating that Fred had planned to come to Yale.
“Maybe he was going to surprise you,” Arietta suggested.
“Maybe.” But Shannon had never known her father to surprise her at Yale. He was keen to tell her how busy his schedule was, how he was still so necessary at the office despite so many people thinking it was better to “work from home.”
Shannon searched through Fred’s calendar to find a dinner reservation at Anchor, not far from Yale’s campus, on May 4th. “Look,” she said to her mother. The dinner reservation was for two.
“That must have been where he was meeting Professor Michaelson,” Arietta said.
But Shannon wasn’t so sure. That particular restaurant was fancy. She’d never been, although Cole had suggested going there for their fourth anniversary, and she’d insisted it was too expensive. “But it’s romantic,” Cole had said, teasing her. “Who cares?” she’d shot back.
Now, alarm bells were ringing in her mind.
“What are you thinking?” Arietta demanded.
But Shannon continued to search for calendar reservations around Yale University. From the looks of things, her father went to fancy and terribly expensive Yale-adjacent restaurants about three or four times a month. She read the names of the restaurants aloud, if only to ground herself in that reality. “The Wig Leaf. The Gratuitous Pig. The Tender Oak. Butter Knife.” The restaurant names felt so normal, since they were a part of her everyday Yale lexicon.
Why on earth had her father gone to them? And with whom?
Arietta’s eyes were the size of saucers. She leaned back in her veranda chair and crossed her arms over her chest as though to protect herself. Shannon quieted down, but she continued to read the restaurant reservations, which went back year after year.
“Are you sure you didn’t go to some of these restaurants with your father?” Arietta asked.
Shannon would have remembered her father's grand displays of love and food. She would have remembered the deep, inspiring conversation over expensive dishes. But most of the time, she’d never even known her father was close by.
“Maybe he made the reservations for someone else,” Arietta suggested.
Together, they looked down at Fred’s phone, realizing that it was also a camera, and that maybe, just maybe, Fred hadphotographed some of the occasions out at these restaurants. Shannon didn’t want her mother to be face-to-face with whatever potential mistress her father had had, so she picked up the phone first, went back to her father’s room, used his face to unlock the screen, and went through the images he had saved.