Page 38 of Dear Debbie

Did you break into our neighbor’s house and wreck his fuse box?

Did you post a video of your former boss banging his secretary?

Where were you last night?

What are you hiding from me?

“That was Garrett,” I finally say. “He’s upset about something with the website. It looks like he…”

Instead of saying it, I show her my phone, where the video is still playing on repeat. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video pretty much says it all. Debbie’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Oh!” she says. “I guess Garrett really is sleeping with Sierra. So much for being a family man, huh?”

I keep my gaze trained on her face, watching for her reaction. “He thinks you’re the one who posted the video.”

“Does he?” She laughs. “What does he think? That I hid a camera in his office months ago to get something I could someday use to embarrass him?”

“Uh, not in so many words…”

“Well, that’s a little ridiculous.” She cocks her head at me. “Don’t you think?”

I don’t know what to say to that. “He wants you to take it down. He says they already lost a bunch of advertisers. And he’s worried his wife will see it.”

Debbie gives the video one last look, then hands my phone back to me. “I’m sure somebody already sent his wife an email letting her know about the video.”

“You…you think so?”

“Oh yes.” She bobs her head. “And as for getting it down, I’m sure that somebody from tech support can reset the password for him. That man spirals into a panic far too easily.”

“Debbie.” I swallow a hard lump that has formed in my throat. “You weren’t the one who… I mean, did you…”

For a moment, she just stares at me. My head is still pounding, but all I can do is stare back into my wife’s brown eyes. I’ve known her for nearly half my life, but I’m starting to wonder if I know her at all.

What have you done, Debbie?

Just when I can’t stand it another second, she pipes up, “Of course not! Where would I even get a video like that?” Then she smiles at me. “I’m starving. Do you feel like pancakes?”

“Uh, sure.”

She’s still humming to herself as she gets dressed and heads down to the kitchen to make us breakfast.

After Debbie is gone, my gaze drops to the small pad of paper by the bed. If I had any delusion that what happened last night was some sort of wild dream, the address scribbled in my handwriting indicates otherwise. I stare at my writing for a moment, not sure what to do. I was so tired when I wrote it, the street name is nearly impossible to make out. It seems to say “Main” but just as easily could say “Maple” or something completely different.

I rip the paper from the pad and stare at it for a moment. And then, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I stuff the piece of paper into the top drawer of the nightstand before heading for the shower.

29

DEBBIE

I’m making pancakes for breakfast.

When I got out of the shower, I had over one hundred unread text messages from Garrett Meers as well as quite a few voice messages. I deleted all of them, then I blocked his number. He can deal with this on his own. After all, I’m not his tech person. I was just the advice columnist, and I was fired, so the way I see it, none of this is my problem.

Also, right now, I need to focus all my attention on making pancakes.

I don’t make them from scratch. I’m not freaking Betty Crocker. I have a box of powdered pancake mix, although I do have some tweaks to make them taste better. I use milk to mix the batter rather than water, and I also add a dash of cinnamon. And once you put it in the pan, you have to cook it just the right amount of time, flipping the pancakes halfway through. It’s not foolproof, but it’s considerably easier than programming a phone app to track your family members.

Izzy comes into the living room first this morning. She hears the sizzling pancakes in the frying pan, and her eyes widen in that same excited expression that Cooper gets when I make him a dinner he particularly enjoys.