Chapter 1: How I began

“Please, Barry. Put down that gun. You don’t need to do this.” I tried as best as I could to stop one of my clients from making a huge mistake. I had just given him all the evidence he hired me to find. There was plenty of it and it had been going on for a few years.

“It’s over, Michael,” he sobbed, keeping his gun pointed at his temple. “My life is over, I can’t live with her betrayal constantly in my mind.”

I tried to think of a way to make him not take his own life, but I was too pissed off at myself. I had made a big mistake, I should have checked on his emotional state before I presented to him the proof of his spouse’s wayward activities with their son’s football coach.

Damn, I hate it when there are kids involved. It just makes my job even harder, why don’t these cheaters think about the lives they will ruin? If they don’t love their spouse any more, they should at least think about their kids. Wait, his kid!

“Think about your son, Barry,” I exclaimed. “Do you want him to grow up without his father?”

“My son?” he asked. It seemed to work because he lowered his gun from his head.

“Yes, your son! Your life is not over, Barry.” I informed him. “Remember, the proof gathering is just the beginning. My work has just begun. Your marriage might have ended, but your life will start anew. And I’ll make them pay.”

When he dropped his gun on the ground and started crying, I knew the worst part of this crisis had been averted. I’ll do right by Barry, and his son too, of course.

I hate cheaters, always have. Interestingly enough, I gained my title as the Anti-Cheater way back when I became a video game tester during my teenage years. I refused to use cheats to go through the levels and find any bugs. Then I became a game championship judge, I still hold the current record of 10 cheaters caught during a single championship. In that year, the Kart racing final was a doozy. A girl won, due to me disqualifying her opponent, he thought his moves were too fast for me to catch him. She later thanked me in the back room when no one was around.

It was my first kiss, I still had a silly smile on my face when I got home. My mother asked me what happened and I told her I had fun.

And no, I did not rule in her favor for a kiss, that would have been cheating.

Later on, I changed the focus of my hate to a different kind of cheater. It is also one of my jobs too.

It all started back when I was still a university student. Quite a long time ago.

At the time, I was in a 3-year relationship with Tiffany. She was my first in quite a lot of things. We started dating during our high school junior year and managed to get accepted into the same university. I was studying computer science and her philosophy.

During the first 2 years of our relationship, we had plenty of fun, we went on plenty of dates and hung around each other’s houses. Our parents were really happy when we told them we wanted to date each other. We didn’t take long to exchange “I love you’s”.

Our parents always warned us to never let our constant time together affect our studies. We didn’t, but we did study together, a lot.

Even though we were in different courses, we still studied together during our first semester at the University.

Things changed when we entered our second semester. She chose to study a lot more with her classmates always saying she had a group study assignment. I never worried because I did too and we still saw each other a lot during weekends.

Until that changed too. Our time together was progressively getting smaller. I should have seen the red flags.

I later found out, through a mutual friend, that Tiffany was failing most of her classes, which I found weird because of her constant studying with her friends.

I really wanted to know what was going on with her but she kept shutting me down at the slightest mention of studying or university. She didn’t want to know much about what I was doing and she didn’t want me to know her case as well.

Something was definitely wrong. So I decided to at least try to find out.

I wasn’t really happy with myself for what I decided to do, but she left me no other options. I started searching through her stuff for evidence. Back then it was really hard and the digital age wasn’t as ingrained into everyday people’s life. Smartphones had just started popping up and most of the current popular social networks were still in their planning stages.

She did have a computer though and I remembered seeing her past uni work on it. So, one day when she was in class, I went to her house and her mother invited me in like always. She told me her daughter wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, I replied to her it was fine and asked if I could use their computer to do some university work while I waited. Not knowing my real intentions, she told me it was fine with her and informed me she had to leave to do some groceries. I was fine with it, in fact, that would definitely make it easier for me since I didn’t want to risk her finding out what I was doing.

I booted up my Tiffany’s computer with my plan in mind to make as much use as possible of the time I had available. I put a stack of floppy disks on the desk, I did say it was a long time ago, didn’t I? The operating system’s desktop appeared on screen and I started scouring for any trace of her uni work. I don’t know a lick about philosophy, but I still wanted to see what kind of work she was turning in. Nothing, there was nothing but lecture notes for her classes from this semester. ‘Damn, what the hell is going on?’

I searched some more in other folders and found her mementos folder of our relationship which made me feel even worse about myself for going through her stuff without asking her.

By that time, I was starting to get a very good grasp of finding things on computers. It wasn’t nearly as much as what I know now but it was enough. So, I remembered that, for a class project, I developed with one of my classmates a little program that searches for deleted files on hard drives. Did you know that when you delete and recycle a file on your computer its data isn’t actually wiped from the hard drive? Only its space is made available, the data is still there, you just don’t have access to it anymore. Well, I have a way to access it and, luckily, I had its disk with me.

I don’t really remember what made me want to search for her deleted files but I did. I ran the program on the terminal and, after a few minutes, it started listing the deleted files it had found, 12 in total. All files had the same deleted time stamp, two days ago. As soon as my program stopped its search, I started going through them. The first 3 were text files with poems written in French, not knowing the language, I set them aside for later. The next 4 were scanned photos of her and her university friends at a party, I don’t remember going to it. The date on the photo said it was taken when I was away last month at a conference, but she never told me about this party. I noticed that a young philosophy professor was also present in those photos. Red flag! She talked about him a lot. Red flag squared!