Think Twice

She stared at the bottle, but she didn’t pour. “At first, I wasn’t sure myself. Greg and I still had Jeremy in common. Even after he grew up and joined the military. Jeremy is so strong and brave and heroic and all that, but he’s also... there’s something fragile about our son.” She turned and stared up at Myron. Our son. That’s what she said. Our son. And there were two ways to hear that. Emily started pouring. “Really, Greg and I had no real interest in one another. We were long, long over. But once his anger dissipated, you know from what we did to him...”

Myron felt the squeeze in his chest.

“...there was something else there. I don’t know what you’d call it. Friendship isn’t really accurate. He and I didn’t talk much or have a lot in common. But we had trust. And a bond.”

She took a sip. Myron finished the thought for her. “Jeremy.”

“Yeah, I guess. Whatever, I’m not telling this right. But one day Greg came to me and said that he wanted us to get remarried. He offered up a generous financial package. I took it.”

“And he never explained why?”

“He said something about appearances. He wanted to look committed to one woman and that it would be good for Jeremy.”

Myron mulled that over. “Did that make sense to you?”

“No. I figured that Greg had gotten himself in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The kind of trouble where it would look good to be married and have a family. I don’t know exactly what, but Greg didn’t have great impulse control. I thought maybe he’d met an underage girl in some club. Or maybe he screwed someone’s wife again. Yeah, ironic, right? Greg was into that. Sleeping with married women. Lot of them. I told my shrink about it. He’s sure that Greg’s trauma was a byproduct of what we did to him.”

Myron stayed quiet.

“No reply?” she asked.

“No,” Myron said. “None.”

“Anyway, Greg just said he needed to be married. We would go to events together, play the part of the happy couple for the media, the great redemption story, and in exchange he would set up the trusts. I liked that for a lot of reasons. The money obviously. But socially too. Friends don’t invite you places when you’re single. Especially me. You once told me I gave off a sex vibe.”

“Emily, I was young and—”

“Oh, I’m not offended. Jesus. Everyone gets so weird about everything nowadays. I do give off that vibe. I always have. I know it. Anyway, married couples — well, the wives anyway — they don’t want that vibe around their husbands. Not when you’re a single woman, even though, ugh, zero interest on my part. Anyway, it worked. Greg and I Part Two. He did his thing, I did mine.”

Emily’s eyes were everywhere but on his. That wasn’t like her. Myron said, “You’re not telling me something.”

“I’m working up to it. It was Greg’s private business. I’m not in the mood to drag it out in the open.”

“It’s not ‘in the open.’ You’re only telling me.”

“That doesn’t make it better. You know that, right? But if Greg’s dead, what does it matter now? And if he’s not dead, if he’s somehow alive...” Emily chewed that over for a bit. Myron gave her space. “Let me show you something.”

Emily took out her mobile phone, her fingers dancing across the screen.

“As Greg got older, he got weirder. I don’t know how else to put it. More reclusive. More online.”

“Greg?”

“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t sound like him, does it? Anyway, so one day he leaves his phone out on the kitchen counter. He’d been on it nonstop the whole morning and I knew his passcode — he always used the same one for everything. So you can guess what I did.”

“Invaded his privacy.”

“Exactly. Anyway, I find he’s got Instagram. This is so foreign to me. Greg. Can you imagine? Greg has an Instagram account.”

“We set it up for him,” Myron said. “It helps with endorsement and branding.”

“No, not that one. I know about the public one. He never goes on that. Esperanza handles that for you, doesn’t she?”

Myron said nothing.

“This is another account. Greg had it under a pseudonym. Here. Take a look.”

Emily didn’t hand him the phone, so Myron went behind her and looked over her shoulder. Strange how the senses remember better than we do, especially smell. He wondered whether she still used the same shampoo, because for a moment he was back in her freshman dorm, her toweling off after a shower, wearing the raggedy old robe he’d brought from home. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t as though he wanted to act on it. But it was there and inescapable.

The Instagram profile picture had a University of North Carolina tar heel logo. Greg’s alma mater. The account’s name was UNCHoopsterFan7. UNCHoopsterFan7 followed 390 people — and was followed by twelve.

“It’s probably a sock puppet account,” Myron said.

“What’s that mean?”

“A sort of pseudonym. People pretending they’re someone else. Sometimes they do it for marketing. Like they’ll be the owner of a restaurant and pretend they’re a customer and rave about it. Or political numbnuts who will post ‘Oh I’m super independent’ and then they’ll defend whatever malfeasance their particular candidate is into.”