Free The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

car still there?”
    The Venza was still idling under the streetlight, yes.
    â€œSend me a picture.”
    Trev liked to mock the out-of-date Samsung smartphone I carried around, but it was good enough to capture a shot of the street, even on a dark winter evening.
    â€œHuh,” Trevor said. “That’s pretty sure his car…”
    â€œ Whose car?”
    â€œIt belongs to a guy named Bobby Botero, and I need to have a talk with him.”
    I perched on the edge of the bed as Trev told me the story of Bobby and Mouse.
    *   *   *
    Mouse had been working in the human resources department of the Ontario Ministry of Labour when she first met Bobby Botero. Mouse’s parents had died within six weeks of each other the previous year, and her only other close family member—an older sister—lived in Calgary, more than a thousand miles away. Uneasy with strangers and slow to make friends, Mouse had been understandably lonely. Her loneliness caused her to resort to the digital crapshoot of eHarmony, which had come up serial snake eyes, until the online dating service placed her in the hands of Bobby Botero.
    Botero impressed her on their first evening out by ordering chilled lobster salad and yuzu aioli at a restaurant called Auberge des P ê ches. He was everything her other dates had not been: tall, confident, adequately groomed. The reason he was so well received at Auberge des P ê ches was that he ran the city’s most successful restaurant-supply business: the plates from which they spooned their chocolate ganache and croustade aux pommes had come from Bobby’s east-end warehouse. Clearly this was a man who knew what he was doing.
    What he was doing was seducing her into a hasty marriage. Only after six months of aggressive courtship and a lightly attended exchange of vows did Mouse finally begin to sense the presence of a deeper, truer, darker Bobby Botero. Bobby, it turned out, liked to be in control. Mouse was expected to phone him at least twice daily when he was in his Danforth Avenue office, keeping him posted on her whereabouts. Eventually he convinced her to quit her job at the Ministry of Labour and take a secretarial job at Botero Food Service Supplies, where she prepared and filed invoices within shouting distance of his office door. Early in her tenure he fired a male accountant for “getting too friendly” with her, which was how he characterized what Mouse had perceived as harmless flirting. Bobby had no social life, and Mouse began to suspect she would never have any real friends of her own … unless she counted Bobby as a friend, which, increasingly, she did not.
    *   *   *
    â€œYou’ll need to borrow Lisa’s car,” Trev said into my ear. “What we’re going to do, the two of us, is box in Bobby’s vehicle, make it so he can’t just drive off. Then I’ll have a word with him.”
    â€œOkay, wait,” I said, liking this less by the minute.
    â€œJust go get in the car.”
    *   *   *
    Mouse’s marriage to Bobby lasted as long as it took for a few of his secrets to float up from obscurity. A furtive phone call to Mouse from Bobby’s aunt Caprice revealed the existence of not one but two ex-wives, both of whom had at various times caused restraining orders to be placed on Bobby, and both of whom, when Mouse eventually contacted them, shared similar stories: unwarranted jealousy and tight surveillance escalating to verbal and physical abuse. Mouse saw a grim future hurtling toward her like an ICBM.
    And there was the matter of Bobby’s business. Botero Food Service Supplies was a self-evidently successful enterprise: goods flowed from the warehouse in a reliable stream and invoices were paid promptly and in full. But from her position at the account desk it seemed to Mouse that something was—well, off.
    â€œBecause it isn’t entirely a