Page 8 of Crashing Without Justice

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said evenly right before he hung up, leaving me to work on damage control.

After a few moments of absolute nothingness, I picked up the phone, then dialed my ex-wife. I needed to speak to her before speaking with our son, and all I could do was pray that she had some substantial advice that could actually help.

“Hey, Harding,” she greeted after the third ring.

“Hey, Les,” I sighed.

“If you’re calling me to warn me about Paige, then you’re too late,” she said, and of course I was. “She sent me a text late last night, wanting to know if I was up to having lunch with her.”

“What did you say?”

“C’mon, Harding,” she whispered quietly. “I’m always going to do what’s best for Brendan and Raylee, and that does not include badmouthing you. Besides, I stopped caring for her back when she mentioned how I could have named Brendan something less common.”

Yeah, I’d forgotten about that.

Chapter 6

Paige~

It was concerning how easy it was to get someone’s personal information on the internet, but that security flaw was working in my favor now. Not to mention, with just a few sweet words for the customer service representative, I’d been able to get all of Harding’s contact information, and I’d even been able to check out a lot of his activity, which had proven disappointing.

As I searched for names on social media, I thought about how it looked as if Harding had been telling the truth after all. I couldn’t find anything incriminating about him and his whore before he’d told me about her yesterday. Yeah, his call logs showed that he had called and texted her a lot, but no more than he’d call or texted me, his friends, or his family. There’d been nothing significant to set off warning bells, and that’d been disappointing. I needed more ammo, and I wasn’t going to stop until I found it.

Now, while I hadn’t planned on calling and texting his contacts to let them know what Harding had done, shame was often a way to help someone find their way home. After all, most sins were committed under the cover of night because they were wrong, and the person that was committing the sins knew that they were wrong. All Harding needed was a little push in the right direction, and I was willing to help with that.

I quickly posted some more Christian inspirational memes to keep my friends and followers informed of where my feelings were, then went back to go through Harding’s contacts. Now, while I didn’t know every face to every name in his phone, most of the names were familiar to me. I had a good idea of who to contact to get my point across, and if I missed a few people, it wouldn’t really matter in the end. Harding finding his way back to me was the priority, so that’s what I was most concerned with.

However, as I thought about who to text next, another idea occurred to me. At the same time that I was helping Harding to find his way back, maybe I could help his whore find someone else to get her claws into. After all, why should she get off without a scratch. She’d been very aware of Harding’s marital status when she had decided to spread her legs for him, so why shouldn’t she have to pay also?

In fact, the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized how that’s where I’d gone wrong when Patrick had divorced me. While Patrick and I hadn’t exactly been high school sweethearts, we’d met in our early twenties, and that’d been close enough. He’d been about to go into medical school, and I’d been going to nursing school. We’d been the perfect match until Patrick had begun to put personal ambition above taking care of people, and so I had naturally begun to lose interest in the healthcare field.

At any rate, my error had been letting his new love interest off the hook. The second that he’d started posting pictures of their relationship, I should have gone after her. I should have exposed her for the homewrecking whore that she’d been. Again, I didn’t care about Patrick’s claims that they hadn’t started dating until a year later, men only left their wives for other women, and that’s exactly what Patrick had done, though he’d been more clever about it than Harding was being.

Luckily for me, in Harding’s attempt to take responsibility for his actions, he’d told me his whore’s name, and armed with that, I decided to put him on hold for the moment. Her name was Trista Preston, and I was also lucky enough to know who she worked for, so that helped narrow things down. However, before I could look her up, my phone began to ring.

Harding.

I declined his call, already knowing why he was calling. He’d probably gotten wind about the calls and texts, and so he was calling to either yell at me or ask questions, both of which he no longer had a right to. I didn’t need to explain myself to him, and I wasn’t going to. After all, why should I be the only one to carry this very public burden. Not to mention, I’d been posting since last night, and Harding has yet to comment or apologize on any of my posts. He was letting me carry on my public shame alone, and that was just wrong. He should be begging for my forgiveness both in private and public.

Three phone calls later, a text popped up, but I didn’t open it. Harding would be able to see that it’d been read, so he’d be expecting a reply to which I didn’t have time for right now. I was on a mission to find out all that I could about Trista Preston, and I wasn’t going to let Harding distract me from that.

As I pulled up one of Trista’s social media pages, it was private, and that was going to be a problem. Nevertheless, her profile picture was one of her, and she looked the complete opposite of me, not matching Harding at all. Trista had black hair, and maybe green or hazel eyes, and that was too dark for Harding’s fair coloring. At six-foot-three, Harding Rice had dark blonde hair and blue eyes, giving him that All-American college fraternity look about him. He also kept himself in shape at forty-six, and he really was good-looking if I did say so myself.

At any rate, I began searching other social media websites, but all her accounts were private, not doing me any good. So, I was left with no choice but to have to pay for her public records, which I didn’t mind doing. Sure, I should be a little more careful with my finances now that things were up in the air between me and Harding, but the means would eventually justify the ends, so I’d worry about that later.

Twenty minutes later, I was armed with her name, her ex-husband’s name, her parents’ names, and her basic information. Trista Preston was forty-years-old, five-foot-three, had black hair, green eyes, and her birthdate was February tenth. Her ex-husband’s name was Frank Indigo, and luckily for me, his social media accounts weren’t private, giving me the names of their two children, which were five and seven. It was also obvious that her ex-husband had moved on some time ago, and I wasn’t surprised. No one honored their commitments anymore, which was really a shame.

At any rate, keeping my credit card out, I was able to find out all public information on both her parents, and even though they lived down south, that didn’t matter with the wonders of the internet. Honestly, I was rather surprised that her parents were still together. After all, you’d think that her parents would be divorced since she had so little respect for the sanctity of marriage.

Setting my phone down, my mind started racing with what to do next. I needed a way into Trista’s social media accounts, so I needed to create a fake one to get my foot in the door, but it needed to be under a name that she’d accept as a friend. However, in order to do that, I needed to come up with a name that she’d be familiar with, so I needed to investigate some more.

As ideas began to form in my head, my phone chimed with an incoming text again, and even though I knew that it had to be Harding again, I decided to finally read the messages.

Harding:Answer ur phone, Paige

Harding:We need 2 talk

Staring at my phone, it chimed again, but this time, the text was from Heady.

---