3. Security Breach
SECURITY brEACH
CHARLIE
R ight now, three things are making me sing along at the top of my lungs to the car radio. I’m adding dancing in my seat at every stoplight, too.
One: I’ve got a box of lemon lavender cookies on the seat next to me from the cutest little bakery.
Two: Right now at work, we’re in the calm between storms. Which means storm prep, for sure, as we work through all the data we downloaded from Aragundi’s servers.
Being a good intelligence operative means being adaptable, and the only way an operative can really shine at being adaptable is if the person behind the scenes running things—me—has over-prepared.
But storm prep also means that I get off at a very predictable time .
And three: Workers showed up at my townhome to get the water leak fixed before I even left for work this morning.
I’m a little freaked out to have people working in my place when no one is there, but at least everything should be ready to go for the get-together with friends that I’m hosting in a few minutes.
When I get home, I have to park out front.
The Lord of the Leaks truck, with its cartoon plumber wearing a crown, is gone.
But a truck with the name Demo Daydreams is parked in my spot in the driveway.
This cannot be good. Especially since it means I had workers in my home that I hadn’t even met (or vetted) before I left for work this morning.
I grab my box of cookies and head up to my front door.
As soon as I open it, I know something is off.
Not only am I hearing voices I don’t recognize, but everything just sounds weird and echoey.
I walk past my laundry room and bathroom to where I can see the kitchen fully, and I gasp, one hand flying to my mouth, eyes wide. My kitchen wall is gone!
The cabinet below my sink, as well as the cabinets on either side of it and the two upper cabinets in the same area, are in the space to the side of my living room, stacked by my small table and on my chairs.
The countertop has been removed, too, and it’s lying face down across my table, both ends going out well beyond my table, the upside-down sink, along with part of its pipe, just sticking up like a periscope on a turtle’s back.
And not only is the Sheetrock missing on my side of the wall, but it’s missing on Owen’s side, too, so I can see right into his townhome. I hadn’t seen Reese pull up, but she rushes in only seconds later and joins me in gasping and staring in horror.
Two workers—one in his mid-thirties and one who looks twenty—are busy taking down the last of the wall on Owen’s side, and as soon as the older one sees me, he steps between the upright wood pieces of the wall’s frame to come to my side.
“Things look a little different than when you last saw it, huh?”
“What happened?” I ask.
“Your plumbers had to cut into the wall to get to the broken pipe, and when they did, they found water damage. That’s when they called us.”
“And so you decided to take out the whole wall?” Reese asks.
“Not the whole wall,” the man says. “We’re leaving the frame. And it’s better this way, trust me. You’ll want this fully fixed, not just covered with a bandage that’ll cause problems later.”
“I have people coming over any minute,” I say, my voice coming out more like a squeak.
As if being summoned by the words “people coming,” Owen walks warily into his townhome, taking in the destruction with a shocked look on his face that mirrors my own.
“Oh, and there’s our other occupant! I was just explaining to your neighbor that we had to take out the wall because of water damage.”
When Owen’s eyes cut to the side, I notice for the first time that he’s got a pile of cabinets and a stretch of countertop on his table, just like I do.
The man turns back to me. “I’m Leandro, by the way. This is Josh. And having guests over is no problem. You won’t even know we’re here. And look—your landlord left jugs of water for you. We’re close to finishing up for the day, but we’ll get some plastic sheeting up before we go.”
“Plastic sheeting?” I say, not believing I’m actually hearing any of this.
“Yep! It’ll basically be a wall. It’ll be fine.”
Owen and I are staring at each other. I’m feeling a mix of commiseration that we’re both in this scenario that I never could’ve guessed we’d be in just twenty-four hours ago, and feeling incredibly exposed.
When surrounded by your home’s walls, having your next-door neighbor (who is also surrounded by his home’s walls), being able to see you, is just wrong.
I don’t get much more than about two seconds to take it in, though, before a knock sounds at my door.
Reese takes the box of cookies from me, and I walk in a daze to open the door for my sister- in-law-to-be, Mackenzie, her best friend, Livi, and who I’m convinced will eventually be another sister-in-law, Zoe.
They are each holding a big box containing everything we need to put together the wedding favors for Mackenzie’s and my brother Jace’s wedding.
I just say, “Come in.” No need to explain—they’re about to experience it.
The moment they reach the kitchen, they all freeze, mid-step.
“Charlie!” Livi says. “Why does your kitchen look like it lost a fight with a wrecking ball?” Then she turns to me. “Was it the Kool-Aid Man?”
The guy in charge waves. “It’s a fun and unexpected twist, isn’t it? You ladies just go about whatever you have planned. Pretend we’re invisible.”
As I’m directing my friends around the construction mess to put their boxes on my coffee table, Owen starts talking with the construction worker.
I keep sneaking peeks at him. He’s dressed in a T-shirt and well-worn work jeans, and has a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind one ear and a tool belt slung low on his hips.
His boots are dusty, and there’s a smudge of drywall powder on one forearm and a streak of something—possibly caulk?
—on his bicep. Based on the faint white flecks in his hair and the thin layer of sawdust clinging to his shirt, I’m guessing he was cutting or sanding something at work today.
He just looks… I don’t know. Manly and adorable at the same time.
He must feel me looking because his eyes shift to me, and it feels like he’s seeing right into me.
I duck down behind the cabinets that are piled up beside my kitchen table.
Do you know what? A bandage over the problem sounds way better than “fully fixed.” Let’s just go ahead and put my wall back up.
What’s a little water leak? That’s what buckets are for, right?
I have got to somehow overcome my instinct to duck.
It’s not as if Owen—and everyone else in the room—didn’t see me do it.
So while I’m down here, I pick up a little chunk of Sheetrock that they missed when hauling out our old wall and stand, pretending that was all I was crouched down on the floor for.
Then I go to toss it into the garbage and join the others around the coffee table.
Mackenzie is taking things out of boxes, explaining how we’re putting together seed packets.
She’s got craft envelopes, seeds to scoop into them, a hole punch, ribbon, a stamp for one side that has their names and wedding date, and a stamp for the other side that reads, The beginning of something beautiful .
The whole time we work, I keep sneaking peeks at Owen through our suddenly open-concept neighbor situation as he goes in and out of the kitchen area.
Whenever he’s not visible, I feel both immense relief at having eyes off me and a little touch of letdown that I can’t just, you know, see him while I’m in the middle of doing something that has nothing at all to do with him.
Which is weird, but I have to admit that I do like seeing his face.
I look again, right when he’s looking at me. And I don’t duck! I do look away quickly, as one does, but I still think I just scored one for me.
We are all chatting, stamping, and filling seed packets when Leandro and Josh get to the point of putting up the sheeting. I was wondering if the sheeting Leandro said they’d install might be hard plastic sheeting. Like Plexiglas, except solid instead of see-through.
But nope. He was talking about the kind that’s as bendy as fabric and comes on a big roll.
They roll out a section long enough to cover the open area left to right, then unfold the sheeting and staple it to the wood frame at the top, adding a few staples to the side, too.
I’m getting pretty nervous because although the sheeting isn’t transparent, it is translucent—barely—and I can see body shapes on Owen’s side.
Which means he can see them on my side, too.
This feels like such a security breach. And not just that, but a security breach designed to poke at my specific insecurities. I take a deep breath. I can handle this. I can.
They add the sheeting to Owen’s side of the wall, too, and I pretend that I can’t see exactly where everything is on his side of the wall.
The two men clean up, and then the one in charge comes over to tell us that they’re finished and leaving for the night.
Then, just before he turns to leave, he says, “We’ll see you again bright and early on Monday morning. Have a great weekend!”
Reese and I turn to each other. “Monday?” she says.
“We have to go all weekend with a fake wall?” I’m trying not to panic.
“It probably won’t be too bad,” Zoe says. “It almost feels like an actual wall. I had blankets hung instead of walls in one place I lived as a kid.”
I can handle this .
“I still can’t believe they took out the whole wall,” Livi says.
Reese nods. “Well, their name does suggest they dream about doing demo. Otherwise, their company name would be Restoration Daydreams.”
“Maybe they should rename it Open Concept Daydreams.” Mackenzie spreads her hands like she’s picturing it on their van.