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The room tilted slightly. I gripped the edge of the workbench. “What are you talking about?”
“When I was transferring data to test the new screen, I found something in his messages.
But once I saw… Stella, you need to see this.”
He picked up the phone, unlocked it with the code I’d given him, and opened the messaging app. Then he navigated to a feature I didn’t even know existed. Scheduled messages.
Queued to send automatically at future dates and times. There were seven of them. All addressed to the same number.
All scheduled to send over the next three months. Kevin handed me the phone. “I’m so sorry.”
I read the first message.
Then the second. By the third, I had to sit down. The messages were from Robert to someone named L.
They weren’t love letters—nothing so simple. They were instructions. Logistical.
Clinical. Frighteningly detailed. He wrote about documents.
About how easy it would be to make everything look “expected.”
He wrote as if he was planning a future where I wasn’t there. As if my absence could be scheduled. He wrote about the life insurance policy like it was a file on a shelf.
He wrote about our doctor like he was a tool. He wrote about our children like they were part of a script. And the way he wrote about me—like I was paperwork.
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