Watching You: Part 2 – Chapter 11 – Found

Money leaves a trail. I’ve known that since before I had any of my own worth tracking.

 It doesn’t matter how many accounts you route it through or how many names you put on the paperwork –  eventually it touches something public, a filing, a registration, a name attached to an address, and once it’s touched something public, it’s mine if I want it.

Finding a person who deleted her social media didn’t strike me as a challenge along those same lines. It struck me as something that simply needed doing. 

Not urgent in the sense of danger. Urgent in the sense of an email sitting unanswered in an inbox – the kind of thing that sits wrong in you until it’s handled.

I built the whole picture in under an hour and a half.

Sun still coming up outside, laptop open on the bed, me in my underwear with a mug of coffee I made and never actually drank, going cold on the nightstand next to the whiskey glass from the night before that I hadn’t bothered to clear away.

I want to be honest that an hour and a half is generous.

 I could have done it in less.

 I stretched it out because some part of me wanted to sit inside the process a little longer than the process actually required, the way you let a meal go a little slower than necessary because you’re not ready for it to be finished.

I started where anyone starts.

 Not her – her account was gone, and gone accounts don’t answer questions directly.

 You have to go around them, which means going through the people who orbit them.

Mia had never learned to pick friends who understood the concept of privacy settings. 

That wasn’t new information. 

I’d known that about her circle since high school, back when Bree couldn’t keep anything to herself for longer than an afternoon. 

Some things about a person’s friend group don’t change just because nine years and a few hundred miles get added to the equation.

One of her college friends – a girl named Carmen, tagged in half of Mia’s old photos before the account vanished, easy enough to find independently – had left her own profile wide open. 

Public photos. 

Public location tags.

 Public comments that told entire stories in the replies underneath them, the way people do when they’ve forgotten the internet is a room with the door open.

Carmen had posted a photo eighteen months earlier. 

Graduation. 

A local college, not far from where we’d both grown up. 

There in the background, three people over from Carmen, unmistakably her. 

Cap slightly crooked. That same smile that arrived a half second after everything else did.

Done.

The comments underneath told me more than the photo itself, the way they always do. 

People don’t think about the fact that deleting your own profile doesn’t delete the mentions of you sitting in other people’s comment sections. 

It’s the most obvious leak in the entire system and almost nobody plugs it.

I found her employer next.

 A LinkedIn photo from a coworker, tagged at a company holiday party two years back. 

Marketing coordinator, entry-level, nothing that would’ve held her interest for long, judging by a comment she’d left elsewhere complaining lightly about a manager who scheduled meetings at five on Fridays.

Done.

Boyfriends took longer, mostly because people are less careless about romantic partners than they are about coworkers, at least at first.

 But carelessness always shows up eventually, usually right around the six-month mark, when a couple stops being careful about tagging each other in things because the relationship has started to feel permanent enough that privacy starts to seem unnecessary.

One name showed up more than the others. 

Adam.

 He appeared in photos across a span of nearly two years – anniversary posts, a trip somewhere with mountains in the background, both of them squinting into the sun, his arm doing the thing arms do in photos like that, settled, comfortable, not performing anything because there was no longer an audience it needed to convince.

I looked at those photos longer than the others. 

I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Then the photo that actually cost me something.

 A moving truck.

 Boxes on a lawn I didn’t recognize.

Adam holding one end of a couch, laughing at something outside the shot. 

A caption from a mutual friend about a new chapter, the specific brand of caption people write when two people move in together and everyone around them wants credit for having seen it coming.

That made me angry.

 I was angry, looking at a photograph of a couch being carried into a house that wasn’t mine, by a man whose name I hadn’t known existed twenty minutes earlier.

I didn’t look at anything for a while after that.

I came back to it an hour later, coffee gone properly cold, second cup made and also ignored.

I’d gone looking for whatever came after the couch – an anniversary post, a wedding hashtag, something that would tell me how far this had gone.

What I found instead was a gap. 

No posts from either of them together for the last four months on the calendar, after two years of posting together constantly.

Then, further down someone else’s feed, a photo I almost scrolled past.

A bar. A few people I didn’t recognize. Adam in the corner of the frame, arm around someone who wasn’t Mia.

The someone was Bree.

I sat with that for longer than I’d like to admit. 

Read the comments underneath, twice, the way you reread something hoping the second pass will produce a different sentence than the first one did.

 It didn’t.

One comment, from a name I recognized as someone who’d gone to our high school, said something about didn’t know you two were a thing now, with a laughing emoji attached to it like the whole situation was funny to everyone except the two people it should have mattered to.

Small city, you might think.

That’s the easy explanation, the one that requires nothing from anyone – two people who happened to know each other, who happened to end up in the same room, who happened to end up in each other’s arms in a bar photo four months before Mia’s entire online presence vanished without a trace.

I didn’t think it was a small city thing.

I thought it was a Bree thing.

I’d catalogued her once, years ago, the way I catalogue everyone – filed her under a version of herself I assumed she’d eventually outgrow, the girl who threw punch on a dress because she couldn’t stand watching someone else get chosen.

 Apparently she hadn’t outgrown it.

Apparently she’d just gotten better at it, patient enough now to wait for the right man instead of the right cup of punch, and cruel enough to still go after him once she’d decided he belonged to somebody else.

Mia just deleted the whole thing. Every photo, every comment, every trace of nine years of her life compressed into an account, gone in what looked like a single afternoon.

I understood that, in a way I don’t think most people would have. 

She hadn’t wanted to go through it piece by piece – untag herself from his photos, delete the couple ones, keep the ones that didn’t involve him, curate the wreckage into something bearable.

 That takes time, and worse, it takes looking at every single piece of it while you do it.

She’d decided it wasn’t worth that. 

Good girl.

She’d made the decision I would have made, cutting the whole thing off at once instead of bleeding it out over weeks.

I sat with that a while longer before I went back to the trail.

The last piece fell into place almost gently, compared to everything before it.

A congratulations post.

Marketing manager.

A company I didn’t recognize by name but recognized instantly by address, because the address was six blocks from my own office.

Same city.

I checked the date on that comment three times before I let myself believe it.

The date matched, within two days, the exact window her profile had disappeared.

I sat there for a long time with that information doing something slow and uncomfortable in my chest, turning it over the way you turn over a coin you’re not sure is real. 

Coincidences exist. 

People use that word too early, most of the time, reaching for meaning before they’ve earned the right to claim it.

 I told myself that, sitting there, half-dressed, laptop screen the only light in the room by then, morning fully arrived outside without my having noticed it happen.

I told myself that, and I didn’t believe it even a little.

Six blocks. 

A city with a population in the millions, dozens of companies that could have made her that same offer, and she’d landed six blocks from an office she had no reason to know existed, working under a name she had no reason to have ever heard.

Somewhere underneath the part of me that was still doing the math, another part of me had already stopped asking whether it was coincidence and started asking a different question entirely – one I didn’t say out loud yet.

Now what.

I closed the laptop somewhere around eight in the morning. 

Didn’t sleep.

Didn’t try.

Showered, dressed, drove to the office past streets I’d apparently been sharing with her for some unknown length of time without either of us aware of it.

It was the third time I’d driven that block that morning.

I didn’t notice it until the third pass –  didn’t consciously register that I’d looped the same six blocks twice already, that some part of me had apparently decided the office could wait a few more minutes each time without asking the rest of me for permission first.

A familiar silhouette was walking down the street, straight toward a set of glass doors I now knew by address.

Long legs. 

The same walk I’d have recognized in a crowd of a thousand people, nine years later, six hundred miles from where I’d first watched it cross a lawn with a dog twice her size on the other end of a leash.

Mia.

I found you.