

He told himself, “Oh, fuck-she’s chucked it,” but he was still groggy, and he soon fell back asleep. “Ah, did you take the bag to the tip?” he asked. Howells remembers waking upon her return, at around nine. The next day, Hafina got up early and took the garbage to the landfill after all. “I’ve never thrown a hard drive in the bin.

As his head hit the pillow, he recalls, he made a mental note to remove the hard drive from the bag. He remembers her declining, saying, “It’s not my fucking job-it’s your job.” Howells conceded the point. Later, when the couple slid into bed, Howells asked Hafina, who dropped off their kids at day care each morning, if she would mind taking the trash to the dump also. Howells grabbed the unwanted hard drive and threw it into a black garbage bag. He’d removed the drive a few years earlier, after he’d spilled lemonade on the computer’s keyboard. The other held files from an old Dell gaming laptop, including e-mails, music that he’d downloaded, and duplicates of family photographs. In a cluttered desk drawer, he found two small hard drives. “I’m chucking this out, putting this back in-bunch of cables, bunch of paperwork, broken mouse.” “The office area, with the window open, was the smoking zone.” She chatted with Howells as he chose which items to discard.

“She wanted to have a fag with me,” he remembers. I don’t want to be on a hangover and cleaning this mess up when I get back.”Īt around 10:30 P.M., Hafina peeked into Howells’s office. As he recently recalled to me, “The thought process was: I’m going to be drinking every day. Howells, an engineer who helped maintain emergency-response systems for various communities in Wales, often worked from home, and that night he decided to neaten up his office. So he had made plans to treat himself to what he called a “lads’ vacation”: a trip with friends to a resort in Cyprus. Howells and his partner, Hafina, were raising three children, and family trips-like the one that they had taken to Disneyland Paris-were fun but exhausting. The decisive moment, he now thinks, occurred one evening in August, 2013, when he was twenty-eight and at home with his family in Newport, a small city on the Welsh coast. If things had gone just a bit differently, James Howells might today be as rich as the Queen of England. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
