Chapter 3
“What happened?”
“I have forty-three administrator accesses I don’t recognize.”
There was silence.
Then he became completely awake.
“Don’t touch anything.”
“I was about to change the passwords.”
“Don’t.”
That surprised me.
“Why?”
“Because if this is what you think it is, locking them out tells them they’ve been discovered. Send me the export and log out.”
I emailed the file from a secure address.
Evan told me not to open the dashboard again from my usual device.
Then he said something that made the room feel colder.
“Laurel, who besides you could physically get to your laptop?”
I looked toward the hallway.
“Nathan.”
“Anyone else?”
I stared at the spare key hanging near the mudroom door.
“Brynn.”
Evan didn’t respond immediately.
“Call me in the morning,” he said. “And don’t confront either of them tonight.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
After we disconnected, I went upstairs.
Nathan’s side of the closet looked normal.
His shoes were lined neatly against the wall.
His gray overnight bag was missing.
That mattered because Nathan had told me his dinner was local.
He had not mentioned staying anywhere.
I opened the drawer where he kept spare chargers and travel documents.
Nothing looked unusual until I noticed an empty rectangle in the dust behind a stack of envelopes.
Something had been stored there recently.
Something small.
I searched the rest of the drawer but found nothing.
At 12:18 a.m., I received a photograph from Nathan.
A table.
A half-empty glass.
A plate of food.
“Still stuck with the client,” he wrote.
He had cropped the photograph tightly enough that I couldn’t see who was sitting across from him.
I enlarged it anyway.
In the reflection of the wineglass, I could see a flash of red fabric.
Brynn had been wearing red in the photograph she sent me.
I saved that image too.
Then I turned off the bedroom light and lay down without sleeping.
Nathan came home at 2:07 in the morning.
I heard the garage door rise.
Then the kitchen door opened.
His footsteps paused downstairs, probably when he noticed my laptop was gone from the counter.
A few minutes later, he entered the bedroom quietly.
I kept my breathing slow.
He stood beside the bed for almost thirty seconds.
Then I heard him walk into the bathroom.
When he returned, he slid beneath the blanket without touching me.
Five minutes later, his breathing changed.
He was either sleeping or pretending to.
I stared into the darkness and wondered how long he had been lying beside me like that while living another life.
At 6:31 the next morning, I got up.
Nathan was still in bed.
I showered, dressed, and drove to the office before he woke.
Evan was already waiting in the conference room.
He had brought coffee and two laptops.
The expression on his face told me he had found something.
“How bad?”
He turned one screen toward me.
“Worse than random unauthorized access.”
He had compared the forty-three sessions against device fingerprints, IP addresses, browser versions, and authentication history.
Thirty-one of them came from the same unidentified laptop.
Nine came from my home network.
Three originated from a hotel network in Charlotte.
“Can you tell whose computer it was?”
“Not exactly.”
My disappointment must have shown because Evan tapped the screen again.
“But I can tell you something else.”
The unidentified laptop had first connected to our systems eight months earlier using one of my valid authentication tokens.
May you like
It had not guessed my password.
It had not broken through our firewall.
