The Password
The refrigerator hummed its one flat note, and beneath it, the house ticked with the small sounds of a structure cooling after dark — a joist settling, the furnace exhaling somewhere below her feet. Mara sat at the kitchen table with the laptop's glow washing pale blue across her hands, and she thought: this is insane. She thought it and kept typing anyway.
The email password first. She'd used some version of the same one for eleven years, back to graduate school, a string that meant something once — a dog's name, a street number, a year rearranged so it wouldn't look obvious to anyone glancing over her shoulder. She stared at the box that asked her to confirm it, and her fingers hung above the keys the way they might hover over a stove burner she wasn't sure was off.
She didn't know, precisely, what she was protecting herself from. That was the part that made her chest go tight. If someone had asked her, sitting there in the dark in an old T-shirt of Dan's — she'd grabbed it off the chair without thinking, which struck her now as almost funny, wrapping herself in the very thing she was suddenly afraid of — if someone had asked her, *Mara, what exactly are you worried about,*…