“I figured. Obviously, your security’s been compromised.”
My anger flared. I felt naked, exposed, almost as much as I had when Perla had shown me the camera. “Why would someone target a child?”
I corrected myself: Children. Leo, and the boy being taunted.
“People are assholes.”
In this case, true enough. “So someone has our passwords.”
“Which is why you should change them.”
“But how could this happen?”
Perla chewed on a hangnail. “Someone could’ve physically accessed one of your phones, or your computer, or gotten in some other way. Phishing emails, for instance.”
“I wouldn’t have opened an email like that.”
She smiled, in the same way I did when Audrey mentioned unicorns. “There are other ways to steal passwords too. Someone could’ve planted a keylogger, for instance. It could be integrated into your keyboard, and how’re you going to catch that?” I knew she meant I wouldn’t catch it, because I had no doubt Perla would. “Any software you have scanning for an intrusion would miss hardware. And you probably have other computers, right?”
“Sam has one he uses for work, and Leo has a laptop.”
“Then there’s a chance one of them has been compromised,” she said. “Whoever’s targeting you could also have gotten your passwords by looking over your shoulder while you’re on your laptop at a coffee shop.”
Coffee shop. I thought of Brooklyn, then Hannah. If Carver had been stalking Brooklyn, then it could’ve been him too. Really, it could have been anyone.
“Or say you find a USB drive you think contains patient files. Plug it in, and the malware does the rest.”
I opened my mouth to say I wouldn’t plug an unknown USB drive into my computer, but she stopped me. “Before you say that’s not possible, remember this: a shared computer is only as safe as its least diligent user. The scary part is, most of this isn’t advanced stuff. Anyone with access to a search engine could pull it off.”
“So, anyone.”
“Pretty much.”
The door from Imaging swung open, and the radiology tech pushed Leo’s wheelchair through it. Slumped in his seat, hands folded in his lap, my boy looked so much like a younger version of himself that my heart ached.
Perla took this as her cue to leave. Before she did, she downed the last of her coffee and stowed her travel mug in her messenger bag. When she pulled her hand from the bag, she held two plastic-wrapped packages.
“After searching your home, I figured you might need these,” she said.
I took the packages from her. They contained two prepaid cell phones. When Perla tried to hand me my laptop, I pushed it away.
“I don’t want that.”
She stowed it in my bag and slung it with hers over her shoulder. “I’ll check it out further and get it back to you.”
I moved toward my son, but Perla touched my arm. Her eyes flashed with an intensity I suspected mirrored mine.
“Remember: sometimes people are assholes,” she said. “If someone’s messing with your kid, it’s okay for you to be one too.”
24
Audrey rested in the chair beside Leo’s hospital bed, curled into an impossibly small ball, head propped on my folded sweatshirt. With Audrey asleep, Zoe headed home, leaving me alone with Leo.
The MRI had shown Leo had torn his meniscus. No surgery was needed, but he would be off football for the season. While we waited for the doctor to release him, Leo shifted in his bed, restless and sullen. “Where’s Dad?” he asked.
I could have stalled, or fallen back on the excuse I had given the kids earlier about Sam attending a teachers’ conference. But there had been enough lies.
Instead, I told him I didn’t know where his dad was. Then I took a breath and told Leo the parts I felt he could handle. But, really, what kid could be expected to handle any of it? I hardened the edge of my voice whenever I felt it wavering.
I ended with, “I’m sure he’s okay,” although I was not at all sure he was.
Even before I told Leo his dad was missing, every glance in his direction had wounded: his face was a younger version of Sam’s, the flesh surrounding his swollen eye shifting in color over the past few hours from pomegranate to plum. But the signs of physical suffering were shadows of the pain Leo displayed now. At fifteen, he usually showed signs of the man he would one day become, but in that moment, he was 100 percent kid. I read the question in his expression as clearly as if he had shouted it: Why?
I rested my hand over his, letting it linger a moment longer than he normally would have allowed, before pulling it back. “I’ve filed a report with the police, so they’ll be looking for him.”
When Leo’s eyes widened at my mention of police, I backtracked, reciting the line given to me earlier by Officer Torres: “Don’t worry. Odds are your dad chose to leave and that he’ll be back.”
Was it any better for Leo to think his dad’s absence was voluntary? Judging by my son’s face, not by much. I got it. Torres’s words hadn’t given me much comfort either.
Audrey adjusted in the chair but remained asleep. At least one of my children was at peace.
I turned back to Leo to find he too was staring in the direction of his sister and to the window beyond. Who knew which of the two drew his attention more.
“Does she know?” Leo asked. In profile, he looked even more like his father.
I shook my head.
“I don’t think he’d leave us forever,” I said. “When you were a baby, if he ran out to the car, the mailbox, the backyard, wherever—he took you with him.” I allowed myself a brief smile at the memory of an infant Leo swaddled to Sam’s chest, chubby appendages jutting like overfilled balloons from his sling. “He loves you, and he would never leave you. Maybe he just needed to do something alone, something important.”
“What’s more important than us?”
“Nothing.” It was the truest answer. “But maybe there’s something he needs to do before coming back to us.”
Leo didn’t ask what that might be, and I didn’t know how I would have replied if he had. The question he asked, though, was worse.
“Do you think something . . . bad . . . happened to him?”
I lied as easily as I had ever done anything. “Of course not.”
Leo’s face relaxed, and I let him have his moment. Then I steeled myself and asked, “Have you seen your dad around school the past couple of weeks?”
My son’s jaw tensed, and his eyes darted away. “I don’t know.”
I tried to keep my voice soft, reassuring. “You don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?”
“I don’t always see Dad.”
He was lying, but I decided not to push. I knew Sam hadn’t been at school the past couple of weeks, and judging by the way Leo squirmed in his bed, he did too.
The second question was more difficult. “Do you know a girl named Hannah?”
Leo smirked at that. It was Sam’s smirk, reaching all the way to his eyes. “Come on, Mom.”
“Come on what?”
“There are, like, a couple of thousand kids at my school, and half the girls are named Hannah. I know ten at least.”