The Big Rewind by Libby Cudmore

before, but I hope it helps.
    I stared at her picture with tears in my eyes. She was smiling in the photo, happy enough to look almost alive beyond the pixels. I only had a few photos of her and none of them were of the two of us—group shots from the Save Our Bluths run, brunch Instagrams, party candids. For two weeks, I’d carried around the abstract knowledge that she was gone, the day-to-day understanding that I wouldn’t see her in the foyer or at a party. But looking at her picture with her cat by my side, the hard reality of her death hit me square in the chest. It wasn’t fair. It never is, but seeing her so vibrant in this small digital scrap only reinforced the fact that she was taken from us too young, too violently, and seemingly without sense. And my task—whether Philip agreed or not—was to put all the pieces together.
    I sat down on the couch with my laptop. Baldrick knocked into my shin with his head, and I reached down to scratch himbehind the ears. BU for Binghamton University, like her sweatshirt. I pulled up the college website and plugged in all the G names I could think of. Greg L, two hits. Gerald L, none. George L, fourteen names came up.
    But only one of them was George Parker Lennox.

Chapter 17
ANGELS OF THE SILENCES
    P rofessor George Parker Lennox taught music theory, the History of Rock, Intro to New Wave, Punk Theory, and Yacht Rock Senior Seminar. That explained Steely Dan and Billy Bragg. He’d authored an intro-to-music textbook and written the foreword to a book on the Talking Heads. The headshot on his bio matched the man in KitKat’s photograph, Red Sox cap and all. He had a blog. He had a Twitter feed.
    And he had a wife.
    The tape was starting to make sense now. He was the unavailable one and that’s why he was ending it. It wasn’t a breakup, it was a farewell. He probably assumed that she hadn’t contacted him because she understood the tape. And now I wondered if my interception made me responsible for telling him what really happened. Bronco had no reason to be jealous—it was over between the two of them, it might have even been over before the tape was made. There was too much heartbreak in those lyrics for it to be a fond farewell and a fuck-you.
    But it also meant that GPL’s wife could be a suspect. Binghamton was only a few hours away, and it wouldn’t be the first time in history that a wife took care of her husband’s mistress. If I was trying to prove Bronco’s innocence, she was making a pretty strong case for herself without even knowing it.
    I scanned KitKat’s cupcake blog, her Facebook, her Twitter for any conversations that might have tipped the wife off. If they were having an affair, they’d kept it very quiet. He’d never left a comment, wasn’t listed as a follower or a friend. But he was going to have to find out she was dead someday, and I was probably going to have to be the one to tell him.
    I was shaking. I closed the laptop. Baldrick yowled and I poured out the last of the cat crunchies into his dish. He ate while I put on my coat and walked down to the grocery store for distraction, silently begging, Please don’t let me run into anyone, please don’t let me . . .
    â€œHi, Jett.” I was surprised to see Randy by the vegetable corner. Key Food seemed too pedestrian for him and Lovelle; I always assumed they got all the supplies for Egg School and their own kitchens at a more free-range grocery store. “Picking up some goodies for Bronco’s care package?”
    Bronco. I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to visit him tomorrow.
    Randy had a full basket of organic and gluten-free offerings. All I had in my basket was the cheapest, smallest bag of cat food that would get Baldrick through until the direct deposit fairy magically planted money in my checking account. Right now, my washerwoman duties were the only thing keeping me in MetroCards and Trader