Chapter 30
Someone had been poking around in Hope’s stuff online.
It wasn’t really obvious, but she’d been a bit extreme in how she tagged it.
She’d written the specific codes to be uploaded to the private server she’d created for Heather a few years ago herself.
And she’d put five different ways that it could be… backtracked.
Two of those ways were showing up now. Someone who knew the server existed had been poking around. There weren’t any good reasons she could think of that someone would do that. Or even…know…that they could.
She shivered. There shouldn’t be anyone other than Heather who knew that server even existed.
Except, possibly Crispin. But she and her niece had an unspoken rule—no poking around with each other’s computers.
Especially their codes. They just didn’t do that, and she’d drilled that into Crispin’s head when they’d been younger.
Before Hope had taught her about coding in the first place.
And Crispin wouldn’t be snooping in anything related to the TSP.
Plus, Crispin was with Megan and Marcia right now—Marcia had convinced Crispin to go with her to the FCU campus.
They were signing Megan up for different classes in the summer session.
And Marcia was trying to talk to the admissions department about extending Crispin’s classes.
She’d struggled to go back after Eastman.
Marcia was determined to get the school to help somehow.
Hope spent most of the day working on ways to keep it even more secure. It took several hours, but what else was she supposed to do?
Summer was at the hospital sitting with the Rat Daniel, Samia was upstairs somewhere—she’d come home from the hospital upset about something, but she hadn’t told anyone what—Miggy’s kids were downstairs with Frankie, though.
Hope had been ordered by her mom to stay in her room and rest. The others would take care of the kids.
Apparently, they all thought Hope was overdoing it with the kids and everything.
But…Frankie was afraid. She was worried for her mommy. Why wouldn’t Hope want to be with her? Although…defying her own mom right now was not something Hope wanted to do at the moment. She was too tired.
She logged off her server. She was going to actually try to take a nap. She hadn’t slept well the night before, either. She’d been having…nightmares. Lots of them lately.
She was afraid she always would.
Sometimes…in the nightmares…Hope didn’t survive what Wilson had done. And then her family…
She died in her nightmares, and people like Steve Wilson got away with what they’d done. That was a legit fear she had right now, too.
If something happened to her—what she’d found…
No one would ever find it. And it would…be useless. The idea those monsters would just get away with it—no. She couldn’t stand that thought.
Hope just couldn’t.
She stayed right there in her bed and thought about how to make sure that didn’t happen.
What she had found was too important for no one to ever know.