the notice came onto the screen.
“Filed,” Silvia said.
“We did it!” Caroline shouted, throwing her arms around Silvia’s neck.
“You’re welcome.” Silvia smiled, gently extricating herself from Caroline’s embrace.
She finally knew what assistants did. They saved your hide.
“That was too close.” Caroline’s hands curled around a cup of tea. Decaffeinated because she was sure her nerves couldn’t handle any more stimulation without her head exploding. “I definitely need to get Silvia something for Christmas.”
“She earned a fruit basket for sure,” Eddie said. He sat across from Caroline in her guest chair, one foot propped up on the edge of her desk.
“Or a new car,” Caroline said. She was only half joking. “I think Louis is going to get her one if I don’t.” With a swell of warmth, Caroline recalled her boss’s gratitude and joy upon learning that they’d managed to file the missing article in time. He’d promised her a celebratory lunch once the Daubert hearing was behind them. A hearing he now insisted she attend with him.
“Your mad skills came in handy, too. You said your dad taught you how to do that stuff? That’s a very cool dad you’ve got there,” Eddie drawled.
Caroline stayed silent. But with Eddie’s warm eyes looking back at her, she found she wanted to tell the story. It was a story she’d told almost no one.
“My dad and I didn’t hang out a lot when I was a kid,” she began. “He was at work pretty much all the time. The one thing we shared, though, was a love of technology. We liked to do stuff together. We used to like to get into places where we . . . weren’t supposed to be.”
She paused to gauge Eddie’s reaction. He looked steadily back at her, with no judgment in his eyes. So she took a breath and went on. “We had fun hacking together . . . until the day the police showed up.”
She remembered the knock at the door. They hadn’t been expecting anyone that night, so she’d opened the door expecting to find Jehovah’s Witnesses. Instead, she found two officers with grim faces and handcuffs.
“What happened?” Eddie asked.
“We’d been hacking a hospital. Just for fun. We weren’t going to steal any information or anything. We just wanted to see if we could get in. Hospital firewalls are especially hard to hack, because they have to protect all of that personal information for their patients.”
“So it was a worthy challenge,” Eddie surmised. His voice still held no judgment.
Caroline nodded. “We hadn’t gotten past the firewall when my dad had to go to work. But I kept at it. I wanted to impress him. I found a weakness in the hospital’s firewall and opened a port. I was going to show my dad later . . . when he got home. The problem was, later that day, cyberthieves used that port to breach the hospital’s security.”
“Did they get patient information?” Eddie asked.
Caroline swallowed, a sense of shame washing over her.
“No, but they grabbed information about everyone on the staff of the hospital. They also got the personal information of every juvenile dependent of every staff member. Social Security numbers and everything.” Caroline stopped talking. For the rest of their lives, those children were going to have to worry about identity theft, about fraudsters setting up fake bank accounts or terrorists using their identities to get passports. And there was nothing she could do to fix it.
“Did you get arrested?” Eddie asked.
“My dad did. The police traced the hack back to our computer. It was my fault, too, of course. But my dad didn’t want to get his little girl in trouble. So he said it was all him.” Caroline looked down. Her guilt was still fresh, easily touched. That she’d breached the firewall to impress her dad just made the whole thing so much more desperate.
“It was a nightmare,” she continued. “This thing we’d been doing together that seemed so harmless . . . it almost cost him his life, really. Even after he got probation instead of jail, I was scared. We never hacked again.”
Caroline remembered the invisible barrier that had seemed to spring up around the study. As if by silent agreement, they never entered the room again. And they never spoke of it.
“And yet, you became a software engineer,” Eddie said.
“It was the natural thing for me to do,” she said. “But I didn’t like software engineering.”
“Really?” Eddie’s tone held disbelief.
“I found it boring yet stressful.”
Eddie raised a curious eyebrow.
“It’s hard