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Trashley: Twenty-Five
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Ashley and I were having dinner before seeing the off-Broadway show Drunk Shakespeare when she showed me texts from Cecelia pleading for Ashley to come home so they could all be a family again. I felt sad for Cecelia. She was clinging to the life she had before the divorce, whatever that looked like. I’m sure she would’ve loved an extra set of hands and eyes and maybe some sleep too, while parenting their two young children alone. Everything I had gathered about Cecelia from my online investigation work made her seem like a good person. Like the kind who would cup a spider in the house and set it free outside. Yet Ashley had just told me she hoped Cecelia would die or slip into a coma.
Which is how I’d imagine their Dateline episode would begin …
My days of lurking on Cecelia’s tweets were over, because she blocked me on Twitter. But to be fair, I blocked her first, but only on Instagram. I didn’t realize how often I checked Cecelia’s Twitter until it was taken away. I must’ve visited her page ten times an hour. Was I a stalker? I would read articles she retweeted and scroll through her favorite tweets to see what she had liked. I felt like she was sending me smoke signals all the way from Minnesota, warning me about Ashley. Cecelia’s tweets felt like a trail of breadcrumbs I had to follow that would eventually lead me to the truth.
