…”you two got married. He asked me to set up your phones as a ‘family,’ because I’m the one who’s good with tech. He’s the organizer. He sees your location in Find My, all day. Your messages sync to his iPad. The heart rate thing is just the part he lets you see, so you think it’s about caring.”
I sat down very slowly. “Then he knows I’m here.”
“He’s known since you parked,” she said. “That’s why he asked about the stairs. He wanted to see if you’d lie to him.”
I thought about the three years since he told me my sister was toxic. Three years ago was the month she called me and asked, very gently, whether I knew who could read my texts. I told him she was being paranoid. He told me she was jealous. I stopped calling her.
My sister sat down across from me. “I’ve been trying to tell you for three years. I didn’t know how to get you alone without him knowing. And then you just showed up.”
She didn’t tell me what to do. She asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to go home, but not to him. She nodded and made one phone call, to a domestic violence advocate she’d found two years ago and kept the number for, just in case.
The advocate came over that afternoon. She showed me a feature I’d never heard of, called Safety Check, built right into my phone. With her help, we reviewed every person and app that could see my information, and she helped me decide what to turn off and when, so I’d be safe when I did it.
I stayed at my sister’s that night. My husband called forty times. I didn’t answer. A week later I had a protective order and a lawyer, and a new phone that only I have ever held.
The Apple Watch is still in my sister’s freezer, between a bag of peas and a carton of ice cream. She refuses to throw it out. “It stays there,” she says, “so we always remember what it actually measured.”
