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flustered, flighty and sort of useless kind of woman with whom Ginny had never really connected. It was going to be bad enough that she had to tippy-toe around the mess in her house while she waited for her big, strong man to help her with tasks she could so easily accomplish twice as fast and perfectly well on her own. She didn’t need a hovering, cooing mother-in-law there to second-guess and wring her hands fretfully over every choice.
    â€œI gotta go. Lunch meeting. Paul’s picking up Chinese.”
    â€œWell,” Ginny said drily, because how could she stay angry in the face of Sean’s clear delight, “I guess I know what you won’t be bringing home for dinner then.”
    He laughed, and after a moment she did too. They exchanged I-love-yous, his coming first but hers at least sincere, and she disconnected. It wasn’t so much that she wasn’t angry anymore as it was that she was making a deliberate effort—a choice, if you will—to tuck that annoyance away and focus on the positives. She didn’t have to cook dinner. That was a plus. Her husband loved her. Another plus. They’d just bought a new house, and she could be a lady of leisure in it. No more job. Didn’t have to unpack. Bonus, bonus, bonus. Everything she listed eased her irritation into a smaller, tighter package, until she was able to get rid of it altogether.
    That was until she wanted to drink some juice and it was all gone, and when her stomach growled because she still hadn’t eaten, and when she wanted to at least have a peanut butter sandwich and there was no bread, only saltines, and she had to use a spoon because she couldn’t find a knife to spread it with.
    â€œFuck this,” Ginny said aloud. Then again, just because she could, as loud as she wanted, no neighbors with their ears pressed against the walls to hear her. Or at least she presumed so, unless she screamed at the top of her lungs or those kids were hanging around on the porch, nobody would hear her. “Fuck this with something hard and sandpapery.”
    It felt good to have let off just that little bit of steam, but when she had to resort to eating her saltine crackers over the sink because the table was too crowded to set down a plate, Ginny knew there was no way she could wait until the weekend to at least get some part of the kitchen unpacked and organized. She finished her lunch and dusted her hands free of crumbs, then lifted the lid of her laptop to turn the music on since, of course, she hadn’t yet found either her iPod or the speakers that went with it.
    She’d learned to be fastidious about shutting down her browsers, cleaning her cache, signing out of her email and social media sites. Sean had his own computer, but that never stopped him from “just hopping” on to hers if it was more accessible or faster or just plain nicer than his older model desktop—and the laptop almost always was all of those things. No matter how many times she’d tried to explain that the entirety of her job was contained on that laptop, that not only was all the information she gathered confidential—legally—but that when he went in and tried to fiddle around, closing tabs she’d left open on purpose or signing her out of whatever she’d been doing, he was potentially screwing her investigations. She’d thought about setting up a user account for him, except she knew he’d never use it because he only ever intended to do something “real quick” and would see no point. And now, she supposed, since she was no longer working, it wouldn’t matter. He’d been on here this morning though; she could tell because though the laptop powered up to the login screen, the lid itself was slightly sticky. Like from juice. Frowning, she ran her fingers over the metal.
    Sticky.
    Not like someone had spilled juice right on it. More like someone with juice-coated fingers had touched it.