Harper
Password Incorrect.
It’s like I can hear a phantom buzzer going off every time the message pops up on my screen.
I don’t know why the password is wrong, and of course, the saved passwords were on my old laptop.
I'd better ask Sadie to help me before it eventually locks me out for too many failed attempts, if I haven’t already hit that limit.
About fifteen minutes after I send off an emergency help text to Sadie, she and Wade are walking through the door to my office.
Sadie motions for me to get out of the desk chair so she can drive, and Wade leans against the wall next to us.
“Everyone gone for the night?” I ask him while Sadie clicks and clacks away on the keyboard, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“Yup, just the three of us left,” he replies. “Since it is about 11 P.M. on a night when we aren’t open, in case you forgot.”
I scowl at him. “I’m so sorry, do you have somewhere else you need to be right now?”
“Yeah, at home. Asleep,” he grumbles.
“Harper, what did you do to this laptop?” Sadie whines. “Do you know how long it took to set up all the shortcuts and security access on this? Where is half of it? I swear to God, I will remove your admin access on your own laptop.”
“Excuse you. I didn’t do anything to it.” I hold up my hands in defense. “We both know I don’t know enough about this stuff to fuck it up. It’s whatever you installed when you replaced it last year.”
Sadie’s insistent typing falters, her head slowly lifting to look at me.
“Say that again,” she grits out.
“I didn’t fuck it up, Sadie, I promise!” I will not take the blame for this. I don’t touch half the stuff on the computer. Most of my needs are email and the basic Microsoft platforms.
“No, the part about me replacing your laptop. A thing I definitely didn’t do.” She holds my stare as things start to click into place.
“Oh, fuck,” I say, bringing my face down to hover next to hers, the gears working over in her brilliant little mind.
“What are you two freaking out about?” Wade asks, pushing himself off the wall and standing in front of us, trying to peer over the top of the laptop.
He leans a little too far, and Sadie flicks the top of his head, forcing him back while she types.
“Someone took Harper’s old laptop and replaced it with this one. And honestly, it’s a good move. Harper wouldn’t know half the programs she would be missing, at least not enough to have to ask me to install something.”
“Hey!” I protest. Sadie looks up and pats my cheek.
“I love you sister but let’s not pretend you knew what was on your laptop, I think this is the first time you’ve ever tried to access any of the security apps on your laptop since we opened.
And even that is only because you were forced to.
But it’s not your fault, you never had any reason to need to look at any of it, and you have a team who does it for you, so why would you? ”
My shoulders deflate, because we both know she’s right.
“But even if they have her laptop, they wouldn’t know the passwords to any of the programs, right? So, they still wouldn’t be able to access anything,” asks Wade, and I can feel my face drain of color.
“Yeah, about that, I may have saved the passwords on the laptop…like on a little sticky note taped to the corner.” I barely get the words out before Sadie has fully turned towards me, arms flailing as she lashes out towards me.
Wade reaches over and holds her wrists while she breathes through her nose, eyes squeezed shut. I committed a cardinal sin of tech, which is exactly why I didn’t ask her to give me back my sticky note when she swapped the laptops. Was kind of hoping she forgot to yell at me for it.
“We can use this, right? We can figure out who stole my computer?” I ask, hope in my voice that Sadie takes the win instead of focusing on how badly I offended her trade.
It’s also a nice distraction from the fact that I let this happen.
I gave someone the literal keys to the castle.
I trusted the people who worked here to come and go into my office as needed.
To leave me notes or invoices on my desk or chair to take care of when I returned to the office.
My fault, my fault, my fault.
“Yes, we can. But not on this piece of shit,” she complains, pointing at the replacement laptop that she didn’t approve, as if it kicked the puppy she doesn’t have. She’s halfway across the office before she looks over her shoulder to holler at Wade and me. “Move your asses!”
“Okay, so how does this work? What are we looking for?” asks Wade, standing in the center of the security bullpen.
He looks almost too small in the narrow hall, like if he moves too far to one side or the other, he’ll bump a monitor and cause a domino effect of laptop and computer equipment from here to the door.
“Harper, when do you remember the laptop being switched out?”
I scan my memory, trying to remember when I last bitched about the dent in the top corner, and then I remember how I got the dent in the top corner.
“Oh my God, it was almost exactly a year ago, Tommy Ellington’s dense skull.” I tell her, finally seeing Sadie smile as she remembers the series of events that led to me asking Tommy to my back office with one of the dancers. He walked in, but was carried out.
You do not call my dancer a whore when she tells you to stop groping her in the private room and expect to walk away with the same number of brain cells as you walked in with. As it was, he started with only two to rub together, just enough to make poor choices.
Sadie goes back to typing as Wade looks at me expectantly, somehow not putting those two things together. “His head is what dented my laptop to begin with. And when it was replaced, I assumed it was Sadie who did it, because everything, or I thought everything, was copied over exactly as I had it—”
“So, whoever switched out Harper’s laptop is the person who has been ordering all the extra shipments, and why it looks like it’s Harper doing it,” Wade finishes for me as Sadie sighs, like this is so very reasonable and she should have figured it out sooner.
“So, now I’m going through the archive’s security footage for the timeframe around when the laptop was replaced.
The camera that shows the outside of Harper’s office is all we ever needed.
That’s who has been fucking with our footage and why they have been a step ahead of us this whole time.
I couldn’t figure out how someone was hacking into our camera system without leaving any signatures behind, and it’s because they weren’t.
The call was coming from inside the house!
” Sadie explains, volume rising as she scours the footage.
She slows down only when we see a familiar face carrying a laptop under their arm, looking side to side before opening the door to my office and disappearing inside.
“Wade,” I whisper. “Call Colton. Now.”