I was sitting on the couch waiting for Pandora to come back from the kitchen when I noticed she’d left her phone on the coffee table. I hadn’t meant to look at it. In fact, I made a conscious effort not to. Looking at someone else’s phone, even accidentally, always feels like standing a little too close to an open diary. Unfortunately, the screen lit up for just a moment before dimming again, and that was enough to pull my attention away from my own phone. Mr. Whiskers was stretched out beside me without a care in the world, sound asleep in the exact position cats seem to reserve for demonstrating complete confidence in their surroundings. Down the hall I could hear John Mercer celebrating what sounded like another victory in whatever game had consumed his evening. Everything about the apartment felt perfectly normal, which was probably why my brain decided it needed to invent a mystery.
Earlier in the week Pandora had mentioned changing a few privacy settings because of a new app she’d installed for work. At the time I’d nodded, made all the appropriate listening noises and immediately filed the information away in whatever part of my brain stores things under probably important later. Unfortunately, when “later” finally arrived, all I could remember was that she’d said something about location services. Had she turned them off? Had she left them on? Had she been talking about location sharing instead? The more I tried to remember the conversation, the less confident I became. I stared at the phone as though it might suddenly display the answer out of sympathy. It remained completely unhelpful. A cabinet door closed in the kitchen, followed by the unmistakable sound of Pandora moving dishes around. She was clearly making tea. Everything continued exactly as it should have, but somehow I’d become convinced there was something I was supposed to notice.
I leaned back and tried approaching the problem logically, which is usually the point where my imagination mistakes confidence for evidence. If Pandora had actually wanted to hide something from me, leaving her phone on the coffee table would have been an astonishingly poor strategy. She wasn’t exactly the sort of person who accidentally sabotaged her own secrets. Besides, she’d walked into the kitchen without a second thought, which strongly suggested she wasn’t worried about the phone at all. The only suspicious thing in the room was the fact that I couldn’t remember a conversation I’d only half listened to. That realization should have settled the matter, but instead it inspired an entirely new question. What if I wasn’t remembering it because she’d explained it too quickly? Or maybe I’d been distracted by something else at the time. I looked down at Mr. Whiskers. He opened one eye, regarded me with the expression of someone who’d watched this exact thought process unfold dozens of times before, then closed it again. Even the cat seemed convinced the mystery wasn’t worth solving.
John suddenly let out another triumphant shout from his room before immediately returning to silence. Pandora continued moving around the kitchen as though nothing unusual had happened. The refrigerator hummed softly, the air conditioner cycled on and off, and the apartment settled into the comfortable rhythm of an ordinary evening. Meanwhile I remained frozen on the couch trying to reconstruct a conversation that, if I was being completely honest with myself, I’d almost certainly stopped paying attention to halfway through. It occurred to me that I’d somehow managed to build an investigation using nothing more substantial than the phrase, I’m pretty sure she said something. Looking back, that wasn’t exactly a strong foundation for detective work.
“Hal?” Pandora called as she walked back into the living room carrying two mugs of tea. She paused when she noticed me staring thoughtfully at her phone. “You’ve been looking at my phone for an awfully long time.” I accepted the mug she handed me and decided honesty was probably the safest option. “I’ve been trying to remember whether you said you turned off location services.” Pandora smiled almost immediately. “I didn’t. I turned off location sharing for one social media app. My work app still needs location services, so they stay on.” I blinked as the conversation finally returned to me in its proper order. She was absolutely right. I’d remembered half a sentence, quietly rewritten the other half in my head and then spent the last ten minutes investigating the version I’d accidentally invented. Pandora settled onto the couch beside me, and Mr. Whiskers instantly abandoned my lap in favor of curling up next to her, proving once again that his loyalty could be purchased with remarkably little effort. “Solve any exciting mysteries today?” she asked with a grin. I took a sip of my tea and nodded. “One.” “And what did you discover?” I smiled into my mug. “That the biggest flaw in my investigation was assuming I’d been paying attention in the first place.” Just then John wandered into the living room, looked from Pandora to me and asked, “Another one?” Pandora nodded. “Another one.” John simply smiled, grabbed a cookie from the kitchen and walked away without another word. The unsettling part wasn’t that he understood exactly what had happened. It was that he no longer needed an explanation.