by Sara Shepard
The person helping me swivels her chair. “Whose e-mails?”
“Mine! Yours! All of ours!” The guy taps at his phone, his eyes the size of golf balls. “Bethany just texted me! Everyone’s business is up on some public website for everyone to see! And she said that she and a few other people got this creepy text beforehand that said, Get ready. Nothing else!”
“Get ready?” Lorraine murmurs. “Get ready for what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” The man shakes his head. “This is like what happened with that cheating site—what was it? Ashley something? All those married men were exposed?”
“Ashley Madison,” I say dully.
“Bingo.” He points at me. “That’s the one. Or remember what happened with Sony, Lorraine? All those e-mails on that public site? Remember that executive’s Amazon receipts for that dye for her pubes?”
The guys in the room titter at the word pubes—most of the girls look uncomfortable. I’m still dwelling on the phrase sensitive information. Data breach. A chill goes through me. And what does she mean, everyone’s e-mails?
I can’t get out of there fast enough, but on the sidewalks is the same kind of chatter I’d heard inside: Hack. Public Google site. E-mails! The panic is fizzy around me: Is there any way to delete this website? people cry. My mom cannot read my e-mails, dude. And just: Oh shit, oh shit, I could get expelled! A local news van has pulled up to the corner—wow, they caught on to the hack fast—and a cameraman points his lens at a petite, freckled girl in a cropped denim jacket. I recognize her—she and I spoke at a party at her sorority house about me rushing next fall. She is also talking about the hack. Jeez, it only happened five minutes ago, tops. Is this what it was like to watch the plague wreak havoc through London? I hear one of the reporters say the names Harvard and Princeton. I always appreciate when Aldrich is compared to those schools, but the mention of them at this moment jars me a little. I move closer to eavesdrop.
“Raina!”
I whirl around. Sienna Manning is jogging toward me, and a smile freezes on my face. I pray she hasn’t seen that I’ve just come from the bursar’s. I realize how paranoid this is—she’d have no reason to question me even if she had seen me go in there—but still. Too close for comfort.
“Hey,” I say, gesturing to the news vans. “This is wild, isn’t it?”
“What’s wild?” Sienna blinks innocently.
“This hack thing. All the systems went down. And someone says there’s some sort of e-mail breach—everyone’s e-mails are on a public server.” I search her face. “You didn’t know?”
Sienna frowns. She and I met because I used to work for her grandfather. She’s a total knockout with her porcelain skin, big green eyes, and—I’m thinking this happened only recently—gorgeous boobs. Upon meeting Sienna, I thought she’d be a wild, fun friend, but actually, her idea of a crazy night is going to poetry slams and drinking too much coffee. But she’s grown on me all the same. Her innocence is refreshing. It kind of makes me feel bad for everything I’m not telling her.
“You mean even our e-mails?” Sienna asks. Her face has lost a little of its color. “Like, students’?”
I shrug. “Yeah, I guess. Students . . . admin . . . I don’t know who else. I haven’t looked at it yet.”
I’m about to say more, but then my phone rings. When I glance down, my heart shoots to my throat. The caller ID shows Greg Strasser’s name—Sienna’s stepfather. I stab IGNORE in shock. Why is he calling? I just saw him.
A moment later, my phone rings once more. Greg again. I glance at Sienna, certain she’s going to spy the guilt that’s written all over my face, but she’s busy with her own phone, her brow furrowed at something on the screen. “Excuse me for a sec,” I murmur to her, walking a few paces away.
“Hello?” I answer cautiously. Just in case it’s Kit, Greg’s wife—Sienna’s mom—on the other end instead.
“Raina. Thank God you answered.”
Greg’s husky voice is halting but concerned. I feel a pull in my chest. “Uh . . . hi?”
“Are you okay?” Greg asks cautiously.
A gust of early spring wind whips my chiffon scarf into my face. Down the block, another news van jerks to a stop. Reporters jump out and approach some more kids on the green.
“Why would I not be okay?” I ask evenly. I don’t want to raise my voice and arouse Sienna’s interest.
“This hack thing,” Greg says. “You’ve heard, right?”
“Sure. All of the Aldrich systems are down.”
“Yes. And all the e-mails are on some sort of . . . database. Are you . . . is everything okay with yours?”
I slide my tongue into the space at the back of my mouth where, years ago, I’d had a tooth pulled. My parents had no dental insurance, so I’d never gotten a bridge or implant, but now I’ve gotten used to the smooth, gummy absence. It’s my secret worry stone. “I’m not worried,” I say smoothly. It’s not a lie.
“Are you sure?”
“There’s nothing in my e-mails.” I’m starting to feel annoyed. “You don’t trust me?”
“No, but . . .” There’s murmuring on his end. “Shit, I have to go,” he whispers.
And then he’s gone.
I stare at the phone for a long beat, trying to read between the lines. Is Greg trying to warn me that he’s exposed something in his e-mails, something linked to me?
“Everything all right?”
Sienna has trotted over. She looks shaken, but not suspicious—at least I don’t think so. I drop my phone into my pocket as if it’s made of lava and hurriedly fix a smile on my face. “Yep, it’s all good.” And then I link my arm through hers. “Wanna get a cold brew?”
She leans into me, affectionate and trusting. She knows nothing. And she won’t ever know. There’s no way Greg slipped up in his e-mails—he’s as careful as I am. It’s why we understand each other. It’s why we work. The Raina Hammond on the Aldrich e-mail server? She’s the Raina I aspire to. Ambitious. Dedicated. Academic. Moral. The kind of girl who has nothing to hide.
It’s everything else about me—everything those e-mails don’t say—that I worry about leaking. But if I have anything to do with it, that’s stuff people will never, ever find out.
4
LAURA
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 2017
My six-month-old won’t eat. I sit on my queen-size bed trying to force him to my nipple, but nothing. I try a bottle—same. I grab a squeezy pouch from the nightstand and see if he’d like a taste of pureed carrots. Nope. Now he won’t have anything in his stomach when he goes to day care. He’ll be cranky by midmorning. A bear for the day care providers.
“Come on, noodle.” I undo the snaps on my nursing bra again. “Freddie, just have a little, please?”
Freddie arches away from my breast. There’s an almost teasing look on his face, like he knows he’s pressing my buttons. “Freddie, come on!” I moan.
“Geez, babe.”
My husband, Ollie, stands in the doorway, a look of disdain on his broad, ridiculously good-looking face. “You’re being kind of pushy, don’t you think?”
I let the flap of the nursing bra fall over my nipple. “It’s just . . .”
Ollie lifts Freddie from me and cradles him in his arms. “Is mommy being mean?” he says in a goo-goo voice. “Is mommy forcing you on her boob?”
“He needs to eat,” I say petulantly, buttoning up my shirt again.
“You should like mommy’s boobs,” Ollie goes on in Freddie’s face. “I sure do.”
Our baby giggles. I unclench my fingers from the handful of comforter I’ve unconsciously grabbed. Ollie’s just being nice. He’s not chiding me. I don’t know why I instantly assume he’s about to attack every little thing I do these days. When I peer at him again, his eyes are kind, and he’s handing Freddie gently back, murmuring kindly, “If
he’s not hungry, don’t worry about it. He’ll eat when he eats.”
I nod and stand. There’s no more time to waste, anyway. I have four minutes to get into the car or else I’m going to be late. I stuff everything into the baby bag and shrug on my coat over my scrub pants, feeling frumpy and sweaty and really, really not in the mood for work. Dr. Greg Strasser’s latest e-mail flashes in my mind, and I stop short and wince.
“Babe?”
I jump and whirl around. Ollie lingers in the hall. He’s dressed in his police uniform, though his gun holster is empty. There is something inscrutable in his eyes as he stares at me. Dread flutters through my chest once more. “Y-Yes?” I squeak.
“Just be careful,” he says. “With that hack stuff from yesterday, I mean.”
I smooth down my scrubs. Try to breathe. “There’s nothing in my e-mails that could have caused any trouble.” At least I have that solace.
“I just hate that you’re part of the server they targeted,” Ollie says as he starts down the stairs. I follow him. “And I hate that we haven’t been able to shut it down yet. But it’s like, the more we dig into this thing, the more we realize that whoever did this had a beef with higher education as a whole. And whoever did this might not be finished.”
I feel a chill down my spine. “What do you mean by that? Like . . . another wave of identity theft? Some kind of . . . attack?”
Ollie shrugs. “Just watch your back, okay? Until I crack this, that is.”
I smile nervously. “Well, if there’s anyone who can figure it out, it’s you.” My husband has been an officer in Blue Hill—where we live, though we own one of the cheapest homes in the township, a run-down fixer-upper that we can’t exactly afford to fix—for ten years. It’s a sleepy precinct to work for, and most of his business is breaking up teenage parties and issuing speeding tickets. Though recently Ollie shut down a rambling, vacant old house that was being rented out for sexual deviants. This was huge news in the neighborhood—but Ollie mentioned he has a feeling the operation is back in business, simply moving into a new house a few streets away.
His good police work got him noticed, and his boss asked him what sorts of cases he really wanted to work on. Ollie said he was particularly interested in cybercrimes . . . and now a huge case has fallen into his lap. So the hack is a boon for us, in a crazy way. Still, I hate what has happened that’s giving him the opportunity to advance his career. The fallout from the hack has brought Aldrich University to a grinding halt. All of Aldrich University—including the enormous, esteemed university hospital, where I’m a nurse. Because all the systems are down, we have to rely on our paper records for scheduling, which we haven’t kept very diligently because, well, why would we, when it’s all in digital form? And try recalling patient surgery histories and prescription records and past appointment notes off the top of your head. Try calling the insurance companies for every single patient because all those records are lost.
Not to mention the mess with everyone’s e-mails on that server. That’s wreaked havoc on other parts of the school, and scandals have broken right and left: like how the admissions department kept digital documentation of Aldrich applicants’ every personal detail, from their medical history to their arrest records to their transcripts to their parents’ tax returns. Or a report I saw about the dangerous cover-ups that are surfacing—like how everyone in the theater department knew that a certain professor/director is a known sex offender, but no one did anything about it. The longer those e-mails stay on that server, the more dirt people are going to find about everyone.
And that’s not even the half of it. The news broke yesterday that not only was Aldrich hacked, but several Ivies up the Eastern Seaboard were as well. Harvard. Princeton. Brown. In each of those university enclaves, students, teachers, and administrators are dealing with their own versions of hell. The fact that so many schools were hacked calms me a little—not that I would wish this upon anyone else, but it seems less likely that this was for Aldrich specifically and that the hacker is lurking around a nearby corner, ready to strike with physical weapons instead of digital ones.
“Oh my God, I almost forgot. Watch Freddie for a sec, will you?” I place the car seat in the foyer and dash back up the stairs. In my closet hangs the black dress I’ve chosen to wear to the gala tonight. I grab it, my nicest pair of pumps, my makeup bag, and my curling iron and hair spray, shove everything but the dress in a gym bag, and clomp down the stairs again. Ollie eyes my new loot quizzically, especially the short dress, its flirty hem swinging.
“The Aldrich benefit,” I remind him. “Did you forget?”
Ollie looks blindsided. “You mean it’s still happening?”
I reach for the doorknob. “As far as I know, yeah. Why?”
Ollie scoffs. “I’m just surprised, with the hack.”
I drape the dress over my forearm and pick up the baby car seat again. “Well, I’m not the one who makes those decisions. But we have tickets. We should go. It’ll still be fun.”
Ollie tips his head toward the ceiling. The joints in his shoulders crack, a sound that always reminds me of breaking bones. Ollie sometimes works out at a boxing gym and fights against guys mixed-martial-arts style; on one of our first dates, he admitted that he’d broken a few of his opponents’ bones. It’s an image I struggle to reconcile with my soft-spoken, teddy bear Ollie. He claims it only happened a few times. Apparently, sparring is a great stress relief for the pressures of a job in which, literally, you have to prepare every minute to be aiming a gun at someone, or screaming your guts out, or fearing for your life. Still, I can’t quite picture him behaving that way.
“I’m just so slammed,” Ollie says. “We’re no closer to shutting down that database than we were when the hack broke. And I don’t know how it will look—the guy on the task force going to the Aldrich gala instead of burning the midnight oil to take down the hacker? Doesn’t seem right, babe.”
I run my tongue over my teeth. “I didn’t think of it like that.”
“I’ll try and come, okay? But don’t hold your breath. I won’t know until later tonight.”
My smile wavers. I want him to come with me. I don’t know if I can do this particular event alone. Almost nine months ago, when the doctors in the cardiology department bought the more senior surgical nurses tickets to the gala, I’d felt honored. Dr. Greg Strasser and I were—well, our schedules didn’t intersect as much, but the shit hadn’t hit the fan yet.
But now, all that has changed. Going alone will leave me exposed. I need Ollie as my shield.
But how can I explain that without giving something away? I’ve been excited about the event—it will look strange if I suddenly have a change of heart. “No problem,” I say, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. “Your black suit’s clean. Grab it just in case.”
He nods, and we kiss goodbye. I carry the cumbersome car seat out the door. The morning is sunny but below freezing—spring is taking forever to arrive. I snap the car seat into its base, and my baby lets out a giggle. I look into Freddie’s huge blue eyes and feel the rush that will never cease to amaze me—this little man, this miracle, is mine. Such an amazing little treasure. It hadn’t been easy for us, making him. A year ago, we never thought we’d get a baby at all. And now . . . look. Our world is so shiny and bright.
Except it could crack open and smash on the sidewalk.
I swallow hard. No, it won’t. I can’t think like that. Nothing’s going to change.
I slide into the front seat, feeling a whoosh of conviction. I can’t fear Greg Strasser. This is my life, my future, and I need to set the tone. I pull out my phone and look at the e-mail I sent Greg earlier this week. I’ve received your research. Definitely taking into consideration. But I have all I need for now—thanks. It’s popped up in the hack, but if anyone asks about it, I have a ready excuse. The problem is, Greg didn’t write me back.
There’s no way I’m going to e-mail him again and risk it turning up on a hack site. So I compose a new text: Please. We need to talk. Are you going to the giving gala?
The phone whooshes to indicate the text has been sent. My heart pounds, waiting for Greg’s answer—in the old days, he used to get back to me almost immediately. I need to get a grip. I need to fix this. And I have a fleeting, powerful thought that passes through me like lightning: It would be so, so much easier if Greg Strasser were just gone.
* * *
There’s an excited bubble of conversation at the nurses’ station as I clock in. Tina, a surgical nurse who has as much tenure as I do, notices me and grins mischievously.
“What?” I ask—she’s said something I haven’t caught. I’m distracted. I’ve checked my phone relentlessly, waiting for Greg’s reply, but he still hasn’t answered.
Tina’s eyes dance. “Have you heard about Dr. Strasser?”
Her voice is teasing, knowing. My stomach flips. Terrible things come to mind: Greg broadcasting the truth on the marker board the nurses used to keep track of who was attending to which patient. Blaring it over the hospital loudspeaker. Telegraphing it in a hospital-wide e-mail.
“N-No . . .” My throat has gone dry. “What happened?”
Marjorie steps forward. Her mouth is twisted into a smirk. “Some crazy shit came out about him in the hack,” she whispers. “Apparently, he’s having an online affair with someone—and, man, does he talk dirty to her. It’s gone viral. Like really viral.”
Tina pretends to fan herself. “The things he wants to do to her on the MRI machine! I’ll never look at that thing the same way again.”
“I wonder how Kit’s taking it.” Marjorie crosses her arms. “Gorgeous woman like that? And remember when they started dating? It was only what, two, three years ago? He was like Tom Cruise when he jumped up on Oprah’s couch, ecstatic about Katie Holmes.”