by Lynne Silver
“We’re going to upgrade our information security systems,” she said. “Additionally, we will write new policies and procedures about what to do in the event we have a data breach. We want to do everything we can to prevent it”—she gave a rueful look around the table—“because you can imagine how our parent body would take it.”
Casey and her colleagues could imagine. It wasn’t a pretty scenario. The parents at this school were the movers and shakers of Washington. They’d panic if their children’s grades or their yearly income was in the public domain.
“In the meantime, everyone must change their passwords to be in accordance with the new protocol Dan laid out.” Nancy nodded as if the matter were done. “Any questions before we move on to old business?” She gave everyone exactly 1.2 seconds to think before turning the focus to Casey and asking about the status of responses for the upcoming reunions and whether they’d issued a special invitation to someone from the class who was a local celebrity working on the evening news.
The rest of the meeting passed quickly, and after the meeting, Casey headed back to her office, but returned to the conference room when she realized she’d left her water bottle inside.
She paused outside the door when she heard voices from within, and wanted to give the people still in the room time to finish their conversation. She didn’t mean to overhear, but, really, Nancy’s Boston accent was pretty recognizable, and Dan’s deep voice was hard to disguise. Casey froze outside the door, meaning to either knock or come back later, but their conversation kept her glued outside.
“I want you working on this twenty-four seven.” That was Nancy.
“Will do. I’ll find the source of the hack and what systems were compromised,” Dan replied.
“Excellent. I’m hopeful we can investigate and clean this up in-house without having to report anything to the parent body.”
Casey’s mind whirled.
Montgomery Prep had been hacked? Didn’t they have to report the cyber attack to the proper authorities? But…what did that mean for Sam and for her? Wasn’t it a crime not to report something?
She waited a second to gather her composure and then knocked on the door, waited another second, then opened it. “Oh, hey, guys. Sorry to interrupt. I left my water bottle.” She stepped hesitantly in the room, and Dan brushed past her exiting. Casey walked to her former spot at the table and then turned to Nancy, who was now a foot away from the conference room exit.
“Oh, Nancy.” Casey fiddled with the cap on her water bottle then met her boss’s gaze straight on. Was she going to do this; going to follow up on what she’d overheard? “Did you know one of our alumni who happened to graduate in my grade is a special agent for the FBI in their cybersecurity division?” This was where it got tricky. How much to reveal? “He mentioned something to me about other schools getting hacked and told me to call him if something similar happened to Montgomery Prep.” She took a breath and plunged forward. “Not that anything has happened here, and I hope it doesn’t, but if it does, I know Sam could help and Dan’s really busy.”
And not that competent in matters of this sort.
“Casey, that’s sweet of you to be worried about Dan, but if we were hacked, he can handle something of that nature. I would be very unhappy if you were to take something outside the school community. Thus far, Montgomery Preparatory has been one of the lucky schools not affected. I’ve already discussed the matter with the school’s board in an executive session, and we have a plan in place in the event we are breached. I’ll reiterate, there’s no need to contact your friend at the FBI, though I’m interested to hear that one of our alumni is an agent. Perhaps he would come for career day, though it is an unusual career for one of our alumni. Was he a lawyer first?”
Casey prayed her smile stayed steady, but inwardly, she fumed. Nancy was quite an accomplished liar, and that was a scary thing in a boss. And her message had been clear: if Casey went to Sam, Nancy would be pissed. How pissed, she didn’t know. Losing her job pissed? Casey hoped not. Her mom was going through another bout of serious depression and needed her here.
“I already got him to commit to career day, and, no, I don’t believe he was an attorney first.” Casey realized she didn’t know anything about how Sam ended up as an agent, and she was curious. She would’ve pegged him as the least likely candidate, but as she’d seen firsthand, he’d changed a lot since high school.
Nancy took another step to the door. “Time to get back to work.” She exited, leaving Casey alone and shaking with anger in the conference room. Finally, Casey headed back to her office and shut the door on Annie’s curious gaze. Normally, she returned from her Monday meetings full of energy and with a long list of to-do items for the week. Today, she nodded brusquely at her assistant and went to brood in her office.
What was she supposed to do? If she told Sam about the security breach at Montgomery Prep, she could lose her job. On the other hand, if she didn’t tell him, she could be in violation of some sort of federal law. She’d never wanted to be a whistle-blower, dammit, but she might have to turn into one.
It was at times like these she wished she were married or in a steady relationship. Then she could confide her dilemma and get sound advice. Instead, she was totally on her own without even a good girlfriend to lean on. She had lots of friends, but no confidants. To gain a confidant, one had to be willing to confide. Even when she’d had a tight group of friends in high school, she hadn’t been much of a confider. It always felt as though her life were a bunch of secrets held together by gossamer thread. One tug and she’d become unraveled.
Chapter Four
Homecoming Dance, Sophomore Year
Casey whirled with her friends in the middle of the dance floor. Her new favorite song was playing, and she and her girls were getting their groove on. Then the song ended and the DJ switched it up to a slow song, and all her friends found their dates to get cozy in the center of the gymnasium floor. She looked for her own date, but he was nowhere to be found.
Great.
So much for the prestige of a sophomore going to the homecoming dance with the most popular junior boy, if the boy in question was too busy smoking in the parking lot with his buddies. The night had started out nicely. Her mom had dropped her off at the home of one of the junior girls, where everyone met up. Ben had been super attentive, smiling for pictures and being all touchy-feely, which she hadn’t loved, since she was worried he’d feel her hips and her fat.
It had been less fun once they got to the dance and Ben refused to dance. He called it lame and only wanted to hang out with his friends. Fine, she’d told him, and headed out to the dance floor with her girls. During the fast songs, it was fine because everyone was dancing in big groups anyway, but you couldn’t do that during the slow songs.
With a sigh, she turned and headed over to the long food table to find a bottle of water or diet soda. A tap on her shoulder stopped her. “Want to dance?”
It was Sam Cooper doing the asking. She looked down at him from the height advantage her three-inch heels gave her. “Won’t your date mind?”
“Nope. Don’t have one. I came with a group of guys since you turned down my offer.”
“You didn’t…” She closed her mouth. Sam hadn’t invited her to the dance, but he’d left one of his notes in her locker. “Heard you’re going to the dance with Ben Jonas. You’d have more fun with me. Think about it,” the note had said.
The note hadn’t deserved a response. Break a date with the hottest boy in the eleventh grade to go with Sam Cooper? She didn’t think so.
Now that she was at the dance, Sam’s offer was looking better.
“I’m done dancing for now,” Casey said. “I’m going to get a drink.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sam offered, not asking but informing her. Since it was a free country, and being with Sam was better than being alone looking like a loser without a date, she allowed him to walk next to her.
“Where’s Ben?�
�� Sam asked.
“In the parking lot. He’ll be in soon,” she said.
“You don’t know where he is, do you?”
She took her gaze off the assortment of tempting cookies and brownies to glare at Sam. “Yes, I do too know where he is. You’re not as smart as you think you are, Sam Cooper,” she retorted.
“I never said I was that smart,” he replied calmly. “If I was smarter, I would’ve figured out a way to ask you to the dance before Ben.”
“Like I would’ve gone with you,” she said mockingly, then bent over the task of opening a water bottle to hide her shame at saying something so mean. She never meant to be bitchy, but high school was vicious. You had to front all the time, pretending to be super cool.
Luckily, Sam didn’t seem too bothered by her rejection. “If you’d gone to the dance with me, I would’ve danced with you.”
Casey swallowed her water in a big, uneasy gulp. If Sam had noticed Ben hadn’t danced with her once, who else had noticed? Hopefully, only Sam, because he was obsessed with her and always watching her. “Are you stalking me?”
Sam took his own drink of regular soda—full of sugar and calories, but he was the size of a drowned rat, so he needed those calories—and said, “Stalking? No. Aware of you? Yes.”
She didn’t know how to respond to his easy acceptance of his crush on her. “Well, stop,” she hissed. God, how long was this slow song? She’d always liked it before and thought it romantic, but now realized it was whiny and droned on forever.
“Fine,” Sam said. “But if Ben turns out to have left or he’s too drunk or high to drive you home, come find me. My dad is picking up a few of us at eleven.”
She would walk the six miles home in her heels before admitting to Sam that her date was a disaster. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m fine.” And hallelujah, the song finally ended and the DJ went right into Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” Without a backward look at Sam, she ran off to find Amanda and Tania, and they danced and sang loudly about Avril’s heartbreak. Casey thought how appropriate the lyrics were for tonight.
Things only got more complicated when the dance was over and Ben finally found her to take her home. He wanted to head downtown with a bunch of other kids, but she was done waiting around for him to pay her any attention. She might have been a year younger, but several boys had wanted to go to the dance with her, and she’d turned them down to go with Ben. The least he could do was act like he wanted to be on a date with her.
“Whatever,” she told him. “I’ll get a ride with Amanda.” She was sleeping at Amanda’s anyway in an effort not to have Ben see her tiny apartment in the not-so-nice part of suburban Maryland. She felt bad crashing Amanda’s date, but Ben was being an asshole and was probably too high to drive her home. Did he think she was too stupid to smell the pot lingering on his clothes? If she could smell it, so could the teachers chaperoning, and she had no intention of getting suspended or expelled for doing drugs on campus. She never smoked pot anyway; she was too scared of the munchies.
Not leaving with Ben had turned out to be one of her better decisions. On Monday morning everyone was talking about how Ben and three of his other friends were caught smoking on campus. All four boys were suspended for a month and had to do a bazillion hours of community service.
While Ben and friends were in the dean’s office getting suspended, Sam must have been in the computer lab typing her a three-word note. “You looked beautiful.”
She crumpled that note and tossed it in the trash, thought better, then hurriedly went and retrieved it, smoothing the paper out so it could be put in the box under her bed along with all the other notes Sam had written to her. His notes kept her grounded and sustained her on days when school social politics overwhelmed her or when her mom spent three days in the same clothes without showering. Why were the cute guys like Ben such assholes and the nice guys scrawny losers like Sam?
After a lot of soul searching, Casey decided to play wait-and-see about the conversation she’d overheard between Nancy and Dan and whether or not to tell Sam. It wasn’t a matter of national security, and no one was going to die. However, she might lose her job if she did tell, so in case it was discovered that their school’s cyber intrusion was a bunch of kids fooling around, she’d keep it to herself. If it seemed to be part of something bigger, she’d let Sam know immediately, job be damned.
Therefore, her heart rate jumped to as fast as if she were doing an intense spin class when her cell phone rang and it was Sam. Had he had access to her mental wrestling for the last week?
Nah, the FBI wasn’t that good.
“What are you doing for dinner tonight?” Sam asked, turning her thoughts into a jumble. Was he asking her out on a date? She didn’t know how she felt about it, and took a second to decide. Strangely, she actually wanted to see more of Sam and catch up on the last eight years of his life.
“I have a work thing,” she said.
“Tomorrow? Wait, no, I have a work thing tomorrow.”
It took a few more attempts, but finally they settled on Tuesday night for dinner, but at noon on Tuesday, Casey chickened out and had Annie call Sam to leave a message that she couldn’t make it. No excuses, just a straightforward Casey can’t make dinner. What was the point of having an administrative assistant if she couldn’t run interference in your personal life, right? For the past few days, she’d been waffling about dinner with him. On one hand, she wanted to see him again. He’d looked really cute. On the other, she was holding on to this secret that felt as if it would burst out of her the second she saw him, and then she’d probably lose her job. Good-paying jobs at elite private schools were few and far between. She’d probably have to move out of town to find another private school looking for a development director. And her mother needed her here.
Sam, being Sam, didn’t let her rejection stop him. At five-thirty on Tuesday evening, he appeared in her doorway. Annie had left for the night, and there’d been no gatekeeper to stop him from barging into her office.
“What are you doing here? I told you I was busy.” Surreptitiously, Casey glanced into her computer monitor, which she’d shut down, hoping to catch her reflection and praying her lipstick was still on. She tugged the clip out of her hair and shook her hair free.
“I know, but you’re still going to eat dinner. I’ll join you for that.” He stepped farther into her office, looking way too good in a dark suit and with his sunglasses perched on top of his head.
“What if I’m eating a candy bar at my desk?” Which never happened. Her therapist advised her to mark each meal as if it were important. No inhaling food over a keyboard.
He whipped a Snickers from his breast pocket. “On it.”
She couldn’t resist a grin, and in that instant, she changed her plans. “You’re in luck. My schedule opened up and I can grab a fast dinner with you.” She’d call her mother after dinner to check in.
He didn’t answer, but smiled and pointed to the doorway. “I’ll give you a few minutes to wrap up and shut down the office.” She watched his rather fine backside exit her office and appreciated that he was bossy enough to show up at her office despite being told no, but respectful enough of her career to give her space to finish her work. Sam Cooper was a good man. He’d make a good partner to a lucky woman someday.
She frowned at the thought as she mindlessly cleaned up her desk for the night. Why should it bother her that Sam would eventually get married? Because he was hers. The thought popped unbidden into her mind.
It was ridiculous. Sam wasn’t hers. They’d never dated. It wasn’t as if they were old high school sweethearts who had one last act to complete. Yet since the first day of ninth grade, Casey had known that Sam Cooper liked her. If she’d given him the slightest bit of encouragement, she could have had him. He’d made it clear he had a crush on her all four years of high school. She’d chosen to ignore and belittle him instead. He’d taken everything she’d dished out. He’d proven repeatedly that he was no
t a man like her father was—a man who left when things weren’t pretty.
Occasionally when she’d gone too far or said something truly nasty to Sam, she’d find one of his frequent emails or typed notes in her locker. They never chastised her. They simply said things like, “Bad day?”
It had almost been pathetic, and yet it had been heroic too. He was like her personal Clark Kent, always in the shadows, there if she needed him—like when he’d tried to make sure she had a safe ride home from the homecoming dance when Ben Jonas had turned out to be an asshole.
When she and Sam had ended up at the same state university, she’d expected the pattern to continue, but instead Sam had disappeared from her life. No notes, no small smiles across the cafeteria. Nothing. He ditched her after high school, and she realized now she’d come to take him for granted. Why else would she have kept all his notes throughout the years?
It had been a dull ache during college that she no longer held him in thrall. How dare he go and date other girls and stop chasing her? Now, all these years later, he was back chasing her, and for the first time, she might be ready to be caught.
Casey swiped on some lipstick, ran a brush through her hair, then closed her office door behind her as she went in search of Sam. She found him a few feet from her office examining the framed black-and-white photos depicting Montgomery Prep throughout history.
He turned and smiled as she approached. “Hey. You ready?”
She nodded and paused by the photographs. “It seems forever ago, doesn’t it?” she asked, referring to the past when they were students here.
“Forever, and yet I remember it like it all happened yesterday. How is it possibly our ten-year reunion?”
“I don’t know. It makes me feel old. Let’s get out of here.”
His sleeve brushed against her bare arm and she inched closer, hoping to inhale the faint hint of cologne or aftershave on him. They walked through the front entrance of the school quietly, but inside her tummy was hopping lightly at his nearness. In some ways, she wished she was meeting Sam for the first time, because she would’ve flirted with him and made a move on him. In other, more meaningful ways, she was happy she owned the memory of him as a geeky, short high-schooler. They had a long history and wouldn’t have to go through first-date interviews where they each painted a brighter, slightly fictional version of themselves.
