Page 45 of The Meaning Of You

The Hot Silver Fox desk calendar I’d given him the previous Christmas caught my eye, and I smiled at the photo of me that I’d taped to the front. As I flicked through the months, I saw that Davis had circled the days he’d spent in the caravan and jotted notes about deadlines, word counts, groceries needed, and soon. Scrawled by the fourth of June was also the note,wrote 7000 words today, best day ever!!I remembered how happy he’d been when he’d arrived back at the townhouse and we’d celebrated with Thai takeout.

Impatient, I jumped ahead to the week of the accident... and... froze.What the hell?I flicked back to the previous week, then the one before that, and then swept through the month before that, my heart galloping in my chest. Over those six weeks, Davis had spent three to four days ofeveryweek at the caravan, and he’d never mentioned a single word of it to me.

I stared at the dates, a sour pit opening in my belly. It made no sense. He wasn’t writing or editing at that time. He was planning and researching, and he never visited the caravan for that.

I dropped the calendar back on the table and took a moment to reset. As I did, other things began to register. Like the fact that on at least half of the days Davis had been at the caravan, the initials L. K. or a singular J. were noted like an appointment.

I scanned the other stuff on the table but nothing jumped out. The research folder contained a surprisingly sparse amount of material for a month’s work—a few pages devoted to a rough plot outline of an espionage thriller set in Australia and not much else. No detailed character drafts beyond a general physical description—nothing at all compared to what he would usually have ready after six weeks of planning. What the hell had he been doing?

I closed the folder and shoved it away, frowning as the change of angle highlighted a slight bulge. I dragged it back and flicked through the pages until I located the source—Davis’s driver’s licence and passport held together with a rubber band.

What the actual fuck?I stared gobsmacked at the small bundle thatI could’ve sworn I’d seen in the top drawer of Davis’sdesk not that long ago. Was I losing my freaking mind? What the hell were they doing in the caravan?

I shoved them both in my pocket and then stared again at the initials on the calendar. L. K. and J. Something dark wormed through my stomach and my gaze slid to dishes on the countertop. Two sets. And a half-empty tube of lube beside the bed.

Don’t go there. Don’t do that to yourself.

Davis was never that guy. Ever.

Of course he’d have bloody lube. The man had been fifty at the time, not fucking dead. And he sometimes stayed three or four nights if he was in the writing zone.

My attention snapped back to the laptop, and I opened my phone to the photo of the three possible passwords I’d discovered in our shared password lockbox in the notes section. One seemed more likely than the others since it fit the time frame, was simply labelled2, and was way more complicated than what Davis usually ran to. It wasn’t that he was sloppy with his security, but he generally opted for easily remembered phrases rather than long runs of numbers, symbols, and letters. If it worked, then it had to mean something that he hadn’t tried that hard to hide it, right?

I looked upward with a smile. “You sucked at secret spy stuff, just so you know. But also, I’m so fucking pissed at you right now.”

I entered it wrong the first time around and had to try again. On my second attempt, the screen lit up with a photo of the two of us taken on holiday in Adelaide a few years before. We’d had a fabulous seafood meal at a restaurant with a view over the beach. Davis had drunk far too much; we both had. His expression shone with unmistakable happiness.

See,my heart admonished.He loved you, idiot.

Okay, good. Things were looking up. My stomach settled.

But the relief only lasted as long as it took for me to open the laptop’s account details to find it was loaded from an entirely different unconnected account, which explained why it hadn’t shown up on the cloud.

I stared at the screen, real doubt beginning to eat at my heart for the first time.

Why a different account?

Why a new laptop?

Why complicate things?

And why not tell me?

Mostly that last one.

I swallowed the mounting panic and kept looking. As I did, things began to make sense. Most of Davis’s book research and planning was contained in a folder on the home screen rather than the physical folder he generally—no,obsessivelypreferred—and I tried not to let that rattle me further.

Davis had changed his methodology. So what? People did that kind of thing. Authors did. They found a better way of doing things.

Except that when it came to his writing, Davis was a creature of habit. In the rest of his life he was quite the spontaneous guy, but his capacity to write thrived on routine. He used the same coffee cup for ten years, the same expensive biro I’d given him when he first started writing, the same desk, the same playlist, the list went on and on. Davis hated change in that part of his life... any change.

The content of the research folder didn’t raise any red flags. It held all the usual stuff I’d expect for one of Davis’s books where the plot seemed loosely centred around an international sex-trafficking ring, a storyline that fit right in alongside his other thriller narratives. The plot wasn’t fleshed out beyond a sparse outline and there were dozens of research questions unanswered in the margin.

I emailed all the files to myself, bile rising in my throat at the unfamiliar sender address that popped up:twicebitten. Just another thing I hadn’t known about. Jesus Christ, Davis. What the fuck were you doing?

The hits kept coming.

I moved on to the internet history where most of the searches were clearly tied to his new book—loads of unsettling material on sex trafficking and the policing thereof that I left for another time. Law enforcement task forces. Methods of sellingmerchandise. International money laundering corridors, and so on. There was a ton of stuff and I left most of it to study another time.

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