Luke nods. “I know,” he says quietly, “and I’m sorry if I ever made anyone think otherwise.”
It’s exactly what she needed to hear. It’s exactly what she’s always wanted to hear from him.
She’s on the verge of asking for a tissue, but when she blinks a few times, the tears don’t spill.
“And if there’s anything I can do,” Luke says, and it’s clear he’s rehearsed this part, “to make up for it, let me know.”
“Tell me what’s going on with your brother,” she says. “You looked like you got hit by a truck when I asked about him.”
“It’s messy,” he says slowly, then takes a slug of beer.
“And the rest of this isn’t?” She smiles, hoping it’ll take some of the edge off her words. It does, apparently, because he smiles back and studies her for a second or two with an expression she’d describe as almost wistful.
“My brother hacks computer systems the way some of us have too much to drink on Saturday nights,” he says. “You know that, right?”
“I remember some . . . antics, yes.”
“Yeah, everyone remembers that prank he pulled, hacking the Copper Pot’s phone lines and sending calls to that manure store, but since then he’s graduated to bigger stuff.”
That’s not all of it, or else Luke wouldn’t be clearing his throat and studying the wall behind her and shifting his weight from one foot to the other as though the whole story’s trying to worm its way out of his stomach like bad gas.
Charlotte says, “So is that really all there is—”
“He was taking classes at a small community college down in LA. Night classes, mostly. Business administration, that kind of thing. I guess the idea was he was going to go do something with computers, but legit, you know? Like start his own consulting business or something. Anyway, one day the dean of the school up and disappears, and he takes most of the tuition money with him. School’s so broke they have to shut down. I mean, it wasn’t a big operation to begin with, but it was what Bailey could afford. It was the best most of the students could afford. Cheap enough that they didn’t have to take out loans, but expensive enough that they had to work a bunch of jobs first and save. But the whole thing turned out to be a racket, and the dean was planning it for years.
“When Bailey called he was furious, angrier than I’d ever heard him. It was like he’d made this attempt to be an honest, upstanding person and this asshole fucked him over, along with all the other students who’d already paid for the year. I tried to calm him down. Told him he could come up to San Francisco and crash with me for a while, just until he figured things out. And he did come up for a visit. But he only stayed for a day and it was . . . Well, now I see it was kind of his way of saying goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” Charlotte asks.
“He said he was going to do some traveling, try to figure out what he was going to do next. That I probably wouldn’t hear from him for a while. The last time I got on his ass about hacking, I didn’t hear from him for months, so this time I held my tongue, told him to do what he needed to do. A few weeks later, they found the dean of that school living under an alias in Australia. I didn’t connect the two until . . .”
“Until what?”
“My final FBI interview.”
She was starting to put the pieces together, but she didn’t want to put words in Luke’s mouth, so she kept silent, nodding to indicate her understanding.
“So my first interview goes well, I think. I mean, why shouldn’t it? I’m crazy qualified. And I’m exactly what they need. Someone proficient in multiple languages. I figure I’m a lock. But then this agent I’ve never seen before walks into the room and orders everyone else out. Agent Rohm. That was his name. Big guy. Deep voice. Southern accent. Kinda like Foghorn Leghorn. He tells me I’ve only got a thirty percent chance of making it to the academy at Quantico, but there’s a real easy way for me to make it ninety percent. Or he thought it was easy, at least.”
Charlotte just nods.
“He said I could inform on my brother, who was now one of the most wanted cybercriminals in the United States.”
“The dean . . .” Charlotte says.
“Yeah. Bailey’s the one who found the dean. And the stolen money. Even though law enforcement was taking all the credit. Bailey shipped them everything they needed to find the guy; then he fled the country. Meanwhile, the feds took the credit for the arrest, and now they want to put my brother in handcuffs because he hacked, like, a dozen different companies to do it. But I think it was the satellite company that probably put him over the top.”
“Your brother hacked a satellite?”
Luke nods and takes a slug of beer.
“Did he tell the FBI it was him when he sent them the evidence?” Charlotte asks.
“No. But he slipped up, apparently, because something was traceable back to him. Rohm wouldn’t tell me what it was. Could’ve been powers of deduction. Like they looked at the list of students who got ripped off, and there was only one or two who were real good at computers. And then there was one who was real good at computers, and that was Bailey. I wasn’t in much of a position to ask questions. The only thing Agent Rohm would tell me is that my only shot at the FBI would be if I ratted out my brother.”
“And what did you say?”
Luke meets her gaze. “I told him to go fuck himself with an umbrella.”
“Literally?”
“Word for word. If I’d had an umbrella I would have given it to him, but it was sunny out that day.”
Charlotte smiles. “And what did he say to that?”
“He said I’d never get a job in government or any law enforcement agency outside of some rinky-dink small-town police department for as long as I lived. Those were his exact words, by the way. Rinky-dink.”
“And so you went and got a job at the first rinky-dink small-town police department you could find.”
“Yep,” he says, and his smile seems genuine. “I showed him, right?”
For some reason, this story means so much more than his apology. It’s proof, she realizes, that he’s a changed man; that he was willing to give up his lifelong dream rather than betray his family—his only family. That’s not the Luke Prescott she knew in high school. But it’s the Luke Prescott standing before her now, a man dealing head-on with the sacrifices loyalty entails.
“What?” he asks suddenly.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Your face . . . I don’t know. Your expression, I’m just . . .”
“Just what?”
“I can’t read it.”
“I’m impressed.”
He stares at her for a while, and then his entire frame seems to relax, and she wonders if this is the first time he’s talked about this with anyone. If her words are the first nice thing anyone’s said about the sacrifice he made for his brother. Only then does it dawn on her how truly alone he is. A few days earlier she would have described herself as alone. Not lonely. But alone. And by choice. But when she needed help, she had no trouble drawing people around her who cared about her. Kayla, and then Marty, and now Marty’s posse of 12-steppers.
And now Luke? she asks herself.
No, that’s crazy. Luke is just a down-on-his-luck guy looking to make some kind of amends that will smooth his homecoming. But that thing he said, though.
If there’s anything I can do to make up for it, let me know.
Would it be so bad having a cop on her side right now? Especially a smart, highly educated one, who reads textbooks on profiling and crime scene investigation?
Or a hacker who can find people living off the grid on the other side of the world? Could the same hacker tell her everything she wanted to know about someone who had lied to her about who he was?
“Where’d you go?” Luke asks.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s like I lost you there for a second.”
“You did. Kinda.”
“Can I ask a question now?” he says.
“Shoot.”
“You don’t live around here anymore, do you?”
She doesn’t answer.
“And you’re back, but Marty says you don’t have much time. And you changed your name . . . so . . . what’s going on?”