to figure it out, weren’t you?” I said.
Eve shrugged. “Once a mentor, always a mentor, I guess.”
I pulled her desk chair halfway out. “Do you mind?”
When she didn’t stop me, I took a seat in front of the best-equipped array I’d ever known outside an actual lab. I reached for the mouse, but she got there first and laid a hand over it.
“This is a coding practicum, okay? A lab. Not an investigation,” she said. “For the record, you have no authorization from me to conduct any official Bureau business.”
“Got it,” I said. My fingers were itching. I couldn’t wait to get started.
“I can’t be looking over your shoulder every minute, either,” she went on. “I’m not going to be accountable for what you choose to do when I’m upstairs with the baby. Agreed?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and stepped back. “Now if you need anything, I’ll be upstairs with the baby.”
I tried not to smile.
A second later, she disappeared with Marlena and left me alone at the helm, fingers already flying.
CHAPTER 29
I SPENT THE next several hours pounding double espressos from Eve’s fancy Belgian machine and breaking the app’s source code into manageable chunks. This audit was going to take days, if not weeks. I’d only been a fraction of the way through it when Keats took the app off my system, and God only knew what kind of updates had been implemented since then.
At around two, my eyes were starting to cross. I’d written code for twenty-four hours straight before, but this kind of analysis was a more intense discipline. Looking for vulnerabilities in a program isn’t just about finding something unusual in the code. A lot of times it’s about noticing what might not be there, which is another whole kind of insight and nearly impossible to process with a tired brain. Not that I was kicking off for the rest of the night, but I did have to pace myself. So I took a break. I stole some dulce de leche Häagen-Dazs out of Eve’s freezer and gave A.A. a quick call to catch up on things.
“Hey,” she answered just after the first ring.
“Hey, Pooh,” I said. “I hear you’ve been having some unauthorized communication with my mother. Care to comment?”
I thought she’d laugh, or get a little defensive, or something. But instead, there was just a long silence.
“Hello?” I said.
Then finally she said, “I can’t talk right now.”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” I asked. “Do you have a cold?”
“I’m not alone,” she whispered.
“Ohh!”
For a second, I was happy. At least one of us was getting laid again.
But that’s when I heard a depressingly familiar snore in the background. It was the same half pig, half buzz saw drone that had kept me awake through the thin walls of Ashdown House on way too many nights before.
Darren.
“Seriously?” I said. “You know there are three hundred thousand men in the city of Boston alone, right? Not just one.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “It kind of just happened, somewhere after the tequila shooters at Lolita. Can we talk about it later?”
“Sure,” I said. “Or not. Whatever.”
“Are you all right?” she asked. “I can go in the other room.”
My mind was racing with all kinds of things, but nothing I wanted to say out loud. For starters, Darren was a piece of gutter scum, and A.A.’s taste for him truly baffled me. But more than that, if I was being honest, I felt betrayed. Just not in a way that I could see putting out there on the table for discussion. Not right now, anyway. Maybe never.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “I should have texted. I’ll catch you later, okay? Have a good night.”
“Angela?” she said.
I pretended not to hear her. A.A. was free to make all the stupid, horny mistakes she wanted. God knows I’d made a few of my own. But that didn’t mean I had to sit there chatting away while that human error she called an ex-boyfriend slept in the bed next to her. Thanks, but no thanks.
As soon as I hung up, I got a text from her.
Don’t be mad. Please?
I’m not mad, I wrote back.
I didn’t intend to say anything else. It was more like my thumbs had little minds of their own and just kept going.
But you deserve better and you know it, I wrote.
Then I turned my phone all the way off and got back to work.
CHAPTER 30
OVER THE NEXT several days, my life fell into a pattern. I’d