The tension is killing me. I haven’t fully calmed down from what his mom tried to pull, let alone the bomb dropped on me last night.
“Your mom wants to bribe me to stop seeing you.” I put one thing out there, shoving the weight off my shoulders so I have help bearing it before it crushes me.
Connor stills, dragging his attention from the screen to stare at me. He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Fucking bitch. Don’t listen to her. Whatever poison she tried to feed you, it’s bullshit.”
My body sags in relief. “I thought—when I couldn’t get a hold of you. I thought you didn’t want me.”
“Thea.” He puts the laptop on the floor and slides his palms up the sides of my thighs. “I want you. I love you. Everything I’ve been doing is for you. All of it. I’m ready to tell you why I’ve been distant the last few days.”
I lean in, resting my forehead against his. The earthy scent unique to him twines around me as he strokes his thumbs against my legs.
After a minute, he taps my thigh and picks up the laptop again. “We have to prioritize this. Time is running out and I’m not waiting around anymore.”
“What is it?”
Connor sighs. “You know I’m good at weeding out people’s secrets?”
I nod.
“Back when you and I…well, before I revealed myself to you, I did some digging. It wasn’t hard to access for someone like me. I told you I’m good with computers.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s better if I show you what I stumbled on.”
Connor turns the laptop, the screen full of several windows showing photos of necklaces, email transcripts, and Mr. Coleman’s photo.
“What is this?”
“Something sinister. Chief Landry won’t listen. That’s where I was this morning, begging him for an arrest or an investigation after I did all the damn legwork. ‘Evidence obtained illegally is useless’.” Connor pulls a face, imitating Maisy’s dad’s gruff voice. “Bullshit, right? Whatever, like hell I’m waiting around. We’ll get him ourselves if we have to.”
“You’re throwing a lot at me,” I say, head jumbled by the battering my emotions took and wary of where this is going. Connor has always had trouble with my favorite teacher.
“Coleman,” he clarifies, watching me as he taps his laptop screen. He gestures to each of the windows as he talks. “If I didn’t have the comments to compare the conversations to, I might not have figured it out, and then he said that freaky shit to you. It threw up red flags.”
My lips part to interrupt, but he goes on before I voice my questions.
“I couldn’t tie him to the creepy knight username concretely with an ip address match at first—bastard’s damn good at covering his tracks—but there are these insane hackers also onto him, and they sent me on a wild goose chase to get one of Coleman’s trophies back. They gave me the unsealed files once I did, but I’d already seen enough after I broke into his place.”
“Broke in?” I yelp, pushing my fingers in my hair. He broke into our teacher’s house? “Oh my god, Connor. What are you talking about?”
“I had to.” He squeezes my knee. “I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
There’s so much to unpack. Between his confusing explanation and the information overload, I’m speechless. One window in particular pulls my focus and my body freezes.
The relief I felt moments ago vanishes. He already knows my secret. An instinctive refusal rears up, leaving me feeling exposed, but I swallow it back, trying to keep a level head.
He sees you. All of you.
“How did you find that?” With a shaking finger, I point at the browser window with my blog loaded.
“I hacked into your computer and it was in your recent browser history.” Connor shoots me a look that says not the important thing here, and jabs his finger on the screen over Mr. Coleman’s face. “I don’t care about the blog. Although, really, if it’s private you should’ve password protected it, but what matters is it was key in figuring out—”
“You hacked into my computer.” The disbelief spiraling through me is profound. My voice is quiet, but he goes still at the monotone in it. “You spied on me! What gives you the right?”
Connor exhales in exasperation, brows pinched together. “Is that really what you’re focused on when I’m showing you all this evidence that Coleman is an online predator? He gets off grooming his victims, knows exactly how to talk to them. He’s a psycho.”
“A what?”
My mind screams in denial at the word victim. It’s not true. As much as I try to keep calm, a raw anguish overtakes me.
Ignoring the predator accusation for a minute, I hold my head in my hands. It feels like my secret has been wrenched from me, but it was mine to tell, not his to hunt down. “This is too much. If you knew about my blog, why didn’t you talk to me about it sooner? Not that I have to explain anything to you, but it’s a sensitive and personal escape for me.”
Flashes of my conversations with my online boyfriend pop into my head, cut in a harsher light.
I was the one to give us that label. Henry never did. No. It can’t be.
It hurts too much to think about. The only thing my brain can focus on is the lesser, but still stinging pain of Connor hacking my computer. Desperation to shut those old questions about Henry behind an iron wall has me pushing all of my anger on Connor.
“Damn it, Thea. It was before we were really together. I’m sorry I did it. I wasn’t spying. Shit, I know it was wrong, baby. But it helped me find him. What Coleman was doing to you for years. Others, too.”
Others. Doing to you. I shake my head, air catching in my throat. I’m not a victim. I stopped answering the emails. I never sent nude photos.
But Henry still controlled you.
The blog was my safe place to escape the nitpicking from Mom about my body. Henry poisoned it, his infection spreading deep until he had me in his web.
A pained noise escapes me.
Connor sets the laptop aside and picks up the thick file, flipping through to show me. “He’s taught at two schools before he showed up in Ridgeview. He was fired from both after sexual harassment reports and complaints for inappropriate conduct.”
Focusing on the pages as he talks is hard. I barely take in any of the information. My mind keeps chanting no over and over.
“He doesn’t even hide how he favors his female students. And he was all over your blog comments even though you’re inactive, then he’s so focused on you at school. Think about when he showed up here. He’s going to make you his next prize.”
An unpleasant hot and cold sensation flies over my skin. This is insane. How could Henry and Mr. Coleman be the same? It’s so much to think about. I can’t accept it.
There’s only one thing I can control right now: how I feel about the man I love invading my privacy.
Isn’t that what Henry did?
Gritting my teeth, I shove the thought back into a mental abyss. Stop it.
Connor is acting like he was justified, as long as he got to find out his version of the truth. Forget who it hurts along the way in his search.
I’d rather deal with Vivian Bishop and my mother at the same time than face the truth—Connor spying on me.