Chapter Nineteen

Stephanie POV

"I'd love to forget my problems for a night, but we should save a big night out when there's something to celebrate. We should go home. I want to spend some time with Zoë. I feel like I've barely seen her this week."

Jeanne Ellen nodded and started the engine. She drove away from The Dick's house, and I turned to get a last look as we passed it. The last seven years of my life had turned out to be a lie, and I was disheartened to realize it.

The drive home was mostly silent. Jeanne Ellen noticed the garbage bag in the backseat and asked what it was, laughing when I told her it was my shoes.

We stopped once to stretch our legs, use the bathroom and grab some snacks, but in a few hours, we were back in Trenton and pulling into her driveway.

Tank came out of the house while we were gathering some of my stuff and cocked an eyebrow in surprise. "I thought you were gone until tomorrow?" he asked.

"We got as much evidence as we were going to get in one day, so Steph decided she wanted to come home," Jeanne Ellen explained, kissing her husband lightly.

I nodded. "I want to spend the evening with my beautiful daughter. Speaking of Zoë, where is she?"

Tank smiled. "She is playing with Jeanne Ellen's old Lite Brite in the living room. And I can understand why you came home early. We had a great day today; she's such a great kid."

"What did you two get up today?" I asked.

"Well, you already know about the ducks," he began. "We went to the park, and she played on the playground equipment. I helped her with the monkey bars. We went and got frozen yogurt with Ranger…"

"Wait," I interrupted. "You and Zoë got frozen yogurt with Ranger? Why?"

Tank looked a little curiously at me, probably wondering why I was making an issue of this. "I was in the mood, and it's healthy-ish, so I took Zoë. On our way, Ranger called because he needed me to sign off on some documents. So he met us at the frozen yogurt place."

"Oh," I said. Considering what happened last night, I felt a little weird about Ranger being around Zoë. Not that I thought he was a bad influence or would hurt her, but I felt a little awkward about him now.

"Is that okay, Steph?" Tank asked, still looking at me.

"Yeah, it's fine. I was just surprised."

"Alright, good. After the frozen yogurt, we returned here, and I remembered Jeanne Ellen had a bunch of old toys in the basement. I went down, grabbed the boxes I remembered seeing, and showed Zoë the Lite Brite, which she loves. She's been playing with it for an hour now. I was just about to start making dinner."

"What are you making, Lover?" Jeanne Ellen asked.

"Nothing too fancy. Spaghetti and meatballs, with whole wheat pasta."

"I see you discovered the one food she loves regardless of its health benefits," I teased.

"Yep. She requested this dinner," he affirmed.

"Let's go inside then, I'll help you, and we can talk about today. I can grab the rest of this stuff later," I said.

We filled in Tank on everything we had accomplished while we were out, and he said Hector was still getting information from The Dick's laptop. He cloned it and installed a keylogger so they could keep up if anything changed. Tank also told me they found the original cache of videos The Dick had made of the two of us in bed, and three more videos were saved in the cloud that didn't appear to have been uploaded anywhere yet. I was relieved to hear that, though embarrassed Hector had seen them. When I mentioned that, Tank reassured me that Hector doesn't swing that way, and for some odd reason, that helped.

"Here's the part you're going to hate even more, Steph," Tank said.

"What?" I asked warily. It's not like this could get worse, right?

"The videos were originally uploaded to one website, a pay site, that appears to have been set up solely for that purpose. Hector found the FTP files, and it's his website, Steph."

"FTP files? His website? What are you saying?" I had a vague idea, but I needed Tank to spell it out in case I had gone momentarily stupid.

He sighed. "Steph, all indications from his laptop indicate that the videos were made to be distributed and streamed to people who paid for the privilege. And Dick created the website, created the videos, uploaded them and has been making money from them. They probably ended up on other websites when streamers stole them from his website and uploaded them elsewhere."

I closed my eyes, unwilling to see the look of pity in Tank's eyes as he shared his latest revelations. My loving husband, I thought sarcastically, made sex videos of us. Evidently, he was not satisfied with only that particular brand of humiliation because I would never have agreed to have made those videos in the age of the Internet and cloud accounts getting hacked. Nope, he decided not only to upload the videos but to get paid to do so. Fuck my life.

I opened my eyes again. "Please tell me Hector removed the videos from his laptop. At this point, I don't even care if he knows I'm on to him. I can't have more of them go up online."

Tank grinned. "He removed the videos, but he uploaded others in their place. Other videos that are corrupted and won't open. So, he won't know that we have them, and he'll just think they've gotten corrupted on his laptop somehow."

Despite everything, I smiled. "I'd like to thank Hector for everything. Next time I'm at Rangeman, could I see him?"

"For sure. He mostly stays in his office in the basement because he prefers working alone, but I'm sure he'd like to meet you."

When dinner was ready, we all sat at the dining table and ate. Zoë is not much of a pasta eater, but she makes an exception for spaghetti and meatballs. She loves it, which relieves me because it's one of the few things I can cook well.

After dinner, I helped clean up while Zoë spent time with her Auntie Gigi. After everything was clean, I took Zoë and returned to the pool house. I would give her a bath, play with her a little bit, then do our regular bedtime routine before she fell asleep. I needed to stay close to her after everything I discovered today. Seeing the pictures Jeanne Ellen took of The Dick with his second wife and two little boys was soul-crushing, and it broke my heart that one day Zoë would learn he went out and made a new family not very long after she was born. I vowed to myself that I would do everything in my power to be both parents to her and never let her feel insignificant.

When she was asleep in her bed, I tiptoed out and made myself a cup of tea. I wanted to take a long, hot bath, but there was only a shower in the pool house, and I didn't want to go to the main house tonight. Sighing to myself, I retrieved my notebook and a pen and consulted the list I had made last week. I crossed off 'find a shark lawyer' and flipped the page to a fresh sheet. I wrote two headings on this page: Stay in New York and Move to Trenton. I had been thinking during the drive from Greenwich and decided those were my two main options. I didn't want to move anywhere new at this point. Zoë needed stability with all the changes coming, and I didn't want to be too far from my family. I made entries in the New York column, such as familiarity, a job with Sheila, Zoë's daycare, museums, activities, and takeout. I smiled to myself when I wrote takeout because I knew this was probably not a priority to many other people. Those people were probably on better terms with their stoves, though, and I truly loved the variety of foods we could eat without even going far from my apartment. Under the Trenton heading, I wrote down Jeanne Ellen and Tank, Rangeman job, less expensive, close to New York for frequent visiting.

I thought a lot about it, and in the end, I was confident that moving to Trenton was best for my daughter and me. Now I just had to make it work legally.