Chapter 44: The Family Plan

Settings. Her name at the top. Apple ID.

Rachel had tapped it maybe twice in her life. She tapped it now at one in the morning, sitting on the cold marble of the kitchen floor with her back against the dishwasher, Owen still on speaker, and there was the email address in gray type. Not her email. One Michael had made for her the day he set up the phone at the Apple store in White Plains. He’d picked the password. She’d made him short ribs to say thank you.

“I turned everything off,” she said. “In October. Find My, photo sharing, all of it. I sat in a cab and turned off everything I could find.”

“You turned off what you could see,” Owen said. “Voice Memos isn’t on that list. It just syncs. He signs into iCloud on his Mac with a password he made, opens your memos, drags one to the trash, empties the trash. Phone does what the cloud tells it.”

“And the other thing. The managed thing.”

“That profile’s real, but it’s dumber than people think. It can find the phone, push apps, wipe it. It can’t read a text or delete a memo.” A pause. “The Apple ID can do a lot more. Did you ever search anything in Safari on that phone?”

Is ginger tea safe first trimester. Spotting at 8 weeks normal. Dr. Amara Singh reviews.

Chloe swore Michael didn’t know about the baby. Chloe was a liar. Rachel honestly couldn’t decide which lie would be worse.

“Owen.” She could barely get it out. “Could he see my history?”

“If it synced, yeah.” “Rachel, I told you to switch phones in October. I had one in a box for you.”

“I know.”

“So why didn’t you?”

She looked at the phone in her hand.

“My mother’s on it,” she said.

Silence on the line.

“Voicemails. Eleven, from the last year she was alive. ‘Rae-Rae, it’s Mommy, call me back, I made too much rice.’ I’ve had that number since I was sixteen. Michael moved it onto his plan when we got married, and every time the carrier says a message is about to expire, I save it again. They live on the number. If I give up the number, I give up her.” She laughed, and it was not a good laugh. “So I kept the phone he gave me so I could keep my mother’s voice. That’s how smart I am.”

Owen didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, it was gentle, for Owen.

“Don’t touch it. Don’t reset it, don’t sign out, don’t get cute. I’ll be there at eight. I’ll pull the voicemails off the right way, so they’re yours and they’re clean. Then we kill it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She played one. Just the rice one. Her mother’s voice filled Julian’s kitchen, tinny and alive.

She fell asleep on the couch in the living room with the phone on her sternum like a hand.

* * *

At 6:10 the sky over the park was going gray and the phone said SOS.

No bars. She opened Voicemail and got a spinning wheel and then nothing. She called her own voicemail from the landline in Delia’s pantry and a woman told her politely that the number she had reached was not in service.

Michael got up early. He always had. Five-something, coffee, the account holder’s app, a couple of taps. He’d known the minute he deleted that memo that she’d find out, and he’d known what she’d do next, and he’d gotten there first.

He didn’t even know what was on it. That was the worst part. He hadn’t done it to take her mother. Her mother was just in the way.

She walked to the pantry, took Mrs. Ruiz’s wooden meat mallet off its hook, popped out the SIM tray with an earring back, laid the little gold chip on the butcher block, and hit it so hard the knives jumped in their stand.

Then she hit it again, for the rice.

* * *

Owen showed up at 7:58 with a Best Buy bag and two coffees. He looked at the mallet, the confetti of SIM card, the phone with SOS still glowing, and for once he didn’t say anything smart.

“He cancelled it,” she said. “Before six.”

Owen picked up the dead phone and turned it over. “Carrier keeps the account log. Who logged in, when, what they did. I’ll get Kessler to ask for it. That’s a timestamp with his name on it.” He set it down. “It’s not the voicemails. I know.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not.”

The new phone was in a box that had never been opened, on a plan in her name. Forty-five dollars a month, billed to the little checking account Kessler had made her open at a credit union on Broadway. A brand-new Apple ID, a password she made up herself and didn’t say out loud, not even to Owen.

He set it up at the counter in four minutes, frowning. “Six people get this number. Seven, max. You tell me who.”

“Julian. You. Tessa. Delia.” She counted on her fingers. “Dr. Singh’s office. Kessler.”

“Kessler has to file it with the court.”

“Which means Whitfield gets it.”

“Which means Michael gets it.” He slid the phone across the butcher block. “But he gets a number. Not a window.”

She held it. Light and clean, with nobody inside it but her.

* * *

That night she stood under Julian’s shower until the mirror disappeared.

A knock on the open door. She knew it was him by the way he waited.

“Owen told me about the mallet,” Julian said. “And the voicemails.”

“Owen’s a snitch.”

“He was upset. He’ll deny it.” A pause. The steam moved. “Do you want company? It’s fine if you don’t.”

She wiped a circle in the glass. He was leaning in the doorway with his sleeves rolled up, looking at her face and only her face.

“Yeah,” she said. “I want company.”

He washed her hair. Of all things. Slow circles, and her knees nearly went, because nobody had washed her hair since her mother. She waited to cry and it didn’t come. There wasn’t room. She just stood with her forehead against his chest and the water running over both of them, and he held on. He didn’t tell her it would be okay. He didn’t promise to get them back.

Later, she kissed him first. What came after was slow and careful and none of the city’s business.

* * *

The new phone got its first call three days later, at 6:52 on a Wednesday morning.

No name. A 914 number. Westchester. She answered on the fifth ring.

Breathing. Small, fast, wet breathing, like someone hiding in a closet.

Then a tiny voice, hardly there. “Miss Rachel? Mommy’s crying. Daddy broke the wall.”