What are you talking about? You must’ve forgotten. Growing up, I decided the minute I could leave home, I would fly and fly and fly. So I did. I made a point of flying as often as I could, as far as I could. I did not want to be trapped at home like my mom was, stuck in her small world. They say when you get on a plane, 60% of the people around you—six in ten, that is—are afraid of flying. They worry the plane will crash. They’re afraid of turbulence. The fear comes from your utter lack of control. You’re hurtling through the air at four hundred miles per hour, thirty thousand feet above earth. If there’s an accident, it’s catastrophic. In a plane, there is no such thing as a fender bender. You’re going to die a sudden, horrible, fiery death.
My mother could never live with that. So she never flew. You know that better than anyone. You had to overcome your fear of flying, too . . . So I’m sorry to tell you, my mom never went to Kenya. She never brought you a carving of a giraffe. She never brought you a carving of anything. Check your memory banks, and you’ll know this is true.
Xo,
Your best friend,
Linny
I pace in my office, my breathing fast and shallow. Not only has Jacob been reading my messages to Linny, intercepting her messages to me—he’s been writing her responses. I can’t trust anything she wrote to me. I click back through her previous messages. Were any of them actually from her? At what point did Jacob start to intercept them? He may have impersonated me, too.
I look out the window at the woodpile, at the split logs carefully organized in the bin. Jacob wants to bring order to our lives, to our surroundings. Perhaps our marriage had spun away into chaos, and he’s trying to shield me from yet another truth, something worse than two miscarriages. He could be trying to protect me. Why does he not want me to contact Linny? Maybe something has happened to her.
Horrible possibilities race through my mind. Linny was on the dive with us. She died. She ran out of air. But this can’t be true. The news articles reported only two people on the dive. I have to believe Linny’s okay. Maybe she knows something, a secret Jacob doesn’t want me to discover. If I planned to leave him for Aiden, I might have told her. She might know I was ready to divorce Jacob.
I take Jacob’s latest list from my pocket, the one I found in Atlas of Remote Islands.
Photoshop
Update Keywords: Kyra, Aiden, me
Linny email
Photoshop.
Blue-tinted photographs.
In the living room, I search through the photo albums yet again. Some pictures are clearly originals, while others are printed from digital versions. The wedding photographs are all printed. Blue-tinted pictures. The color always looked off to me, but now, even more so. What is wrong?
Photoshop.
Update Keywords.
You were a hacker, weren’t you?
An ethical hacker.
We make our own world.
Back at my computer, I open Google and type “definition of keyword.” Keywords are words or phrases that describe content . . . Whenever you search . . . you type keywords that tell the search engine what to search for.
What would Jacob be updating?
I enter a benign term, “rose garden,” in Google. Instantly, a number of hits pop up for the Rose Quarter in Portland, Oregon; the White House Rose Garden; and others. For “broccoli salad,” images of broccoli salads pop up, an Allrecipes recipe, a New York Times recipe, and other variations. I type in “solar system” and the Wikipedia entry appears above NASA’s Solar System Exploration page, National Geographic, and “Solar System Facts” on Space.com.
On his list, he wrote, Update Keywords: Kyra, Aiden, me. I type “Jacob Winthrop” in the Google search box, and I’m thrown offline. You’re not connected to the Internet. My heart knocks against my ribs. I reboot the computer, but I can’t get online.
Did this happen every time I logged on? The Internet allowed my benign keyword searches but not the personal ones? I try to think back through my previous Google searches, but they blend together. I didn’t consider any connection between the keywords I entered and the Internet cutting out. I thought it was an intermittent faulty satellite connection on a remote island. But what if it wasn’t?
Did he set up my Internet connection to crash when I entered certain keywords? Invariably, the Internet would work again after a few hours or the next day. Giving him time to do what? Alter the search results? The idea is far-fetched. But the dominos fall into each other, collapsing one after the other.
Photoshop.