Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (16 page)

“Whatever you think is best,” Caroline said. She wasn’t going to micromanage how her assistant did her job. Silvia seemed quite capable. No surprise that she’d survived as Louis’s assistant for so many years, even with grooming habits that the senior partner no doubt disapproved of. The woman was plenty competent.

Watching the upload of the backup data caused Caroline almost physical pain. She squirmed with impatience as the white bar crept at glacial speed. She glanced at the clock. They had two minutes. Two minutes before all of their efforts were for nothing. Two minutes before the gates came crashing down on Dr. Heller’s life’s work. Before the doors of the court slammed shut to litigants across the country.

As soon as the court’s website confirmed acceptance of the backup data, Silvia began the upload of the Heller article. The single object of Caroline’s quest. The singular achievement of her short legal career. And they had one minute, thirty-two seconds to load it.

The white bar began its slow progress across the screen. Caroline’s eyes kept moving back and forth between the bar and the time on Eddie’s clock. They’d come so far. And now they sat on the launch pad, ready to blast off into space or ready to explode.

Fifty-nine seconds left.

Forty-three seconds left.

Unable to watch, Caroline stepped outside Eddie’s office. The graceful hallways and the light- wood credenzas were discordant with the gnawing desperation coursing through Caroline’s gut. They had to be down to fifteen seconds by now. Maybe less.

She walked back into Eddie’s office just as 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 to explain. After my dad got busted, tech became like . . . kryptonite to me. But then, once I’d pushed past the fear and gotten back into the game, the stuff I was doing as a software engineer wasn’t interesting. Coding someone else’s designs wasn’t all that challenging or creative. But when I’d think about what
was
exciting and creative, it was the stuff that got me into trouble, and the whole thing would start again . . .”

Caroline trailed off.

“But it all turned out okay for your dad, right?” Eddie prodded.

“It could have been worse,” Caroline allowed. “He was able to prove he wasn’t working with the cyberthieves—that it was just a fluke that we’d ended up helping them.”

“That was lucky that the police believed him.”

“It wasn’t luck. It was a good lawyer.” Caroline sent a spark of gratitude toward her father’s criminal defense attorney. With his patchy beard and ill-fitting suit, he hadn’t looked like he’d be able to do anything to prevent the weight of the law from crushing Caroline’s family. But he had. He’d known exactly which levers to pull to save William Auden from jail. Watching the attorney work, Caroline had realized that law wasn’t so different from tech. Both followed a set of rules that, once mastered, opened infinite possibilities, depending on the user.

“When my dad finished his probation, he became a cybersecurity consultant,” Caroline continued. “He’s still one, except now he lives back east with his new wife.”

“Why’d you stay with software engineering for so long if you didn’t like it?” Eddie asked.

“My dad left my mom a couple years after the hacking incident. His departure didn’t have anything to do with it—their marriage had its . . . issues. But he pretty much vanished from my life when he moved out. He started dating Lily, the woman he eventually married. When they got together, he got wrapped up with her . . . you know how that goes.”

Eddie nodded his understanding.

“In a way, software engineering was my way of trying to connect with him.” Caroline paused, remembering the distant conversations she’d shared with her dad about her work at the start-up. Those stilted interactions were better than nothing, she’d told herself at the time. Looking back, she wasn’t sure. Working in technology had done nothing to dissipate the awkwardness that had settled between them.

“When my dad moved back east with Lily, I was done trying to connect with him. I felt like I could finally—”

“—do whatever you wanted,” Eddie finished for her. “It was also a way of giving your dad the middle finger for bailing on you, right?”

There was truth in his words, Caroline admitted silently to herself.

“I understand why my parents split up,” she said, “but my dad didn’t have to bail on me, too. When he moved back east, I gave up. I stopped trying to connect.”

“What about now?” Eddie asked. “Are you close with your dad?”

“No, and I don’t think we’ll ever be again. He calls me sometimes, but I just can’t talk to him. Not about anything real, anyway. It’s like he wants forgiveness for leaving. Absolution.”

Eddie studied Caroline’s face quietly for a long moment.

“I’m sure he misses you,” Eddie said finally. “And if you don’t mind me being honest, it sounds to me like you miss him, too.”

“Maybe,” Caroline allowed.

Shaking off the heaviness in the room, Caroline smiled.

“What about you? What’s your story?” She glanced at his expensive watch and gold cuff links. “Charmed career? Biggest struggle was deciding between the BMW and the Porsche?”

Caroline meant it as a joke, but Eddie’s eyes sparked with sudden emotion.

“You have no idea,” he said, his voice dropping to a lower register.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline said, alarmed by the abrupt change in mood.

“No, I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “My family’s from a piss-poor town outside Oaxaca.”

“But you were born here?”

“Yeah, my mama came across the border when she was pregnant with me. Don’t ask me how. She cleaned hotel rooms for pennies until she had me. Then she left me with her older brother and went back home. Uncle Antonio gave me a place to live, but he made it clear he had enough kids of his own to take care of.” Eddie shook his head. “No one’s ever given me a thing. I’ve had to make my own breaks—which wasn’t too easy when you’re the smarty-pants kid with glasses in a rough border town.”

Caroline’s gaze traveled to the scar at Eddie’s neck. Perhaps it was a remnant of an old scrape in his old life.

“I wish my mom had taken me with her,” he said.

Caroline nodded in quiet understanding. Eddie’s life, despite its successes, boiled down to one irreducible fact: he missed his mother.

“I’m sure she’d be proud of you.” Caroline knew it wasn’t enough. But it was all she had to offer him.

Eddie let out a long breath, the tension leaving his shoulders, the taut expression leaving his brow.

“I’m sorry I jumped down your throat like that. It’s just when you suggested I hadn’t struggled, it hit a nerve. My sister’s disabled. My mom takes care of her. I’ve been trying to get papers for them to come over. But it seems like it’s never gonna happen. Got this big ole house waiting for years for a family that never comes.”

Caroline grimaced in sympathy.

“Oh, it isn’t as pathetic as it sounds,” Eddie said. “I have some fun, too, from time to time in that big ole house.” He smiled wolfishly, the vulnerability leaving his eyes so quickly that Caroline wondered if she’d imagined it.

“Well, thanks again for helping me get the filing done,” Caroline said, recognizing the need for a change of subject.

Eddie waved away the gratitude. “We both know you’d have filed it just fine even if I hadn’t been here.”

“I’m not so sure about that. And anyway, it was better with you here.”

“Yes, it was,” Eddie said, his eyes holding hers.

Caroline cocked her head at him. Was he flirting? Seeing the embers in his too-long-for-platonic-friends gaze, she concluded that yes, he was definitely flirting. She had a hard time believing he meant it. She knew she had nice eyes, a passable figure, and a mop of dark wavy hair that was best approached by hairdressers as topiary. But Eddie was in another category of good looks. He could have anyone.

“You have no idea how appealing you are, do you?” Eddie asked.

It was a pickup line. And yet, Caroline found herself wanting to fall for it. But then she recalled the platinum blonde in Las Vegas who might or might not have been a hooker. With her heavily processed hair and flagrantly revealing dress, she couldn’t have been more different from Caroline.

As if sensing her thoughts, Eddie said, “I should warn you. I’ve got a thing for smart-as-a-whip women. Especially ones who know their way ’round a computer.”

Rising, he placed his palms on Caroline’s desk and moved slowly toward her.

Caroline was mesmerized by the fullness of his mouth. The way his lips parted as he closed the distance. She considered asking about the woman in Las Vegas, but she found she didn’t care. She wanted this.

The contact was soft at first, then insistent.

She moved toward him, seeking more when he pulled back.