Chapter 7
“I have work.”
“Of course you do.”
Then she ended the call.
I saved the recording.
North Carolina law allowed me to record a conversation I was part of.
Dana would confirm the details before anything was used, but I wanted the file preserved.
Ten minutes later, Evan walked into my office.
“You need to see this.”
He had traced one of the suspicious device sessions more precisely.
The laptop had a host name.
BC-LT-02.
Brynn Caldwell.
Maybe.
Or something intentionally designed to look like her.
“It’s not proof,” Evan warned.
“I know.”
“But it’s direction.”
He showed me another discovery.
One of the stolen proposal files had been uploaded, fourteen minutes after it was accessed, to an external cloud-storage domain.
The account receiving it could not be identified from our logs.
But the domain was associated with a collaboration platform used by a competing design consultancy.
A company named Rowe & Vale.
My heart sank.
Rowe & Vale had beaten us on three of the bids associated with the stolen files.
I knew their managing partner, Everett Rowe.
We weren’t friends.
We had shaken hands at conferences and sat on one panel together.
That was all.
I called Dana.
“Do I contact them?”
“Absolutely not yet.”
“They may be receiving stolen material.”
“Or someone wants it to look that way.”
She was right.
I hated that she was right.
Every answer created two new questions.
At 4:18, Nathan entered my office.
He did not knock.
My assistant stood behind him looking apologetic.
“I told him you were busy.”
“It’s fine, Mia.”
She closed the door.
Nathan held a paper bag from the deli downstairs.
“I brought food.”
That was exactly the kind of thing he used to do when I worked late.
For one dangerous second, the normality hurt more than Brynn’s photograph.
He placed the bag on my desk.
“You didn’t eat breakfast.”
“How do you know?”
“There were no dishes.”
I looked at him.
He looked like my husband.
Same navy sweater.
Same wedding ring.
Same small scar beside his eyebrow from a bicycle accident before we met.
It frightened me how ordinary betrayal could look.
“Sit down,” I said.
He did.
His eyes moved briefly toward my laptop.
Only briefly.
But I saw it.
“Did you want to talk about something?” I asked.
Nathan rubbed his hands together.
“Brynn told me she contacted you.”
“Eventually.”
“She’s upset.”
I almost laughed.
“She’s upset?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. Explain it.”
He looked toward the window.
“What happened between us wasn’t planned.”
“Six months can involve a lot of planning.”
His head snapped toward me.
So Brynn had given him the same number.
Interesting.
“I’m not going to defend it.”
“Good.”
“I care about you.”
“Also interesting.”
“Laurel.”
He leaned forward.
“This hasn’t been easy.”
“For which one of you?”
His jaw tightened.
I had spent eleven years reading Nathan’s face.
He was not grieving our marriage.
He was calculating.
That realization helped more than it should have.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I want us to handle this privately.”
“What does privately mean?”
“No scenes. No dragging friends into it. No blowing up our lives before we know what we’re doing.”
Again, there it was.
He expected a scene.
He was afraid of one.
“What are we doing?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you want Brynn?”
He looked away.
His hesitation was too perfect.
Practiced.
“I have feelings for her.”
“How unfortunate.”
His eyes narrowed.
May you like
“You don’t need to be cruel.”
That almost broke my composure.
