Adele’s silver Benz circled the roundabout and turned south onto Ocean Drive. John waited ten minutes before he approached the house. Tapping their birthday into the keypad, he passed through the empty garage to the kitchen door. Once a sharp woman, Adele’s perpetual wastedness left her vulnerable.

She chased pills with vodka hourly, making her the single most unbridled and irrational paranoiac John had ever met. Despite the fact that he loathed her, he still intuited her every thought. He found the box of damning evidence she’d used to subdue him, and laughed when he saw her laptop at her writing desk.

John copied her hard drive onto disk then he deleted everything. He was surprised to see her half-full bottle of Ikon sitting on the sideboard; she usually kept it in the freezer with her valuables. He drank deeply from it and poured the rest onto the keyboard.

After sorting through her bills and frozen baubles, he probed drawers, cabinets and shelves for anything of interest. He came upon a photograph of them at sixteen, the colors washed out from over exposure. Arms around each other’s shoulders, their twin smiles shone like the sun-glazed waves behind them.

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