Amber hurried home and arrived an hour and fifteen minutes before Darren was even going to leave work. That gave her at least an hour and a half. But she’d have to be quick. There was a lot of information to look at.
First were his home efiles. He really had never made any secret of them. Most people stored their data in the clouds. That is, A and B class. C and D class generally had no access to the Line and so had to store data at home on a variety of media.
Darren had a fingernail media unit (FMU). All you had to was wave an FMU near a palm screen unit and all the data from the FMU would be loaded. Then you could simply project it into the air as large as you needed and rifle through it.
Her heart melted when she projected the data and started reviewing it. It was about all of them. Wedding pictures, pictures of them, places they’d gone. There were emessages they’d done back and forth when they first met; he’d actually saved them. The rest were receipts, financial files, and some videos of Bryan. Amber felt guilty about doubting Darren. What a good guy. The files he had saved were all about their family.
She scanned the rest of the Line data that Darren had loaded on her palm screen. It took considerable amount of time to try to look at everything, as there was a lot. Forty five minutes passed. She saw arrest records of public intoxication, fighting, and causing a disturbance. Darren had told her about that. He’d also told her that he’d gone a few times to a female escort service in his teens. She saw those records too. Hmm, she thought, if Darren was honest about those kinds of embarrassing things, why would he lie about getting married before? Maybe there really is a good explanation.
Amber could tell she was relaxing and feeling better. The more she cooled down and thought about it, the more she realized that Darren really was trustable. She had no reason to doubt that he had a good explanation for the Amy stuff.
Still, that nagging box in the store room had to be looked at. The storage room was through a locked door off the living room balcony. There wasn’t much in there, really. Some boxes, tools, old electronic devices, a bicycle. She found the box right away, a cardboard one-drawer file cabinet kind of thing. She had less than a half hour to go through it. Darren always told her it was just some memorabilia from his youth, stuff his parents gave him, school records, military records. She never questioned it. It seemed like pretty mundane, boring stuff. She wasn’t nosey at all that way.
So when she opened the box, she expected a few minutes of review followed by the same conclusions she’d made after reviewing the FMU and the palm screen data. She expected to quickly conclude that Darren’s been on the up and up all this time so there’s a good explanation for Amy.
But when she first opened the box and thumbed through some of the files, she was stunned. The first thing she noticed was a document with the name, Amy Fortin, on it. There were many more with Amy’s name on them too. A marriage record, birth records, Adoption to Commune records, 4M treatment records, court records. And pictures of this Amy. Oh shit!
In awe, Amber studied the pictures of Amy. She was young and beautiful. A little funky clothes and hair style, but gorgeous nonetheless. She was likeable. She no longer felt jealous now that there was a face to the name. But there was a new problem, an even bigger problem.
With the box in her arms, Amber walked into the living room and sat it on the main eating table. She began to take out papers one by one and organize them in different piles; the pictures, marriage and baby records, 4M treatments and miscellaneous court records.
She was crying now, not really knowing why. Darren hadn’t cheated on her.