Nights with My CEO novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: 2:14 A.M.

Gwen stood in my hallway in a puffer coat over pajamas, holding a laptop against her chest.

She looked past me and saw a very tall man in my doorway, wearing a towel and my grandmother's afghan.

"Oh my God," she said.

"This is Gwen," I told Reed. "Gwen, this is."

"I know who it is." She didn't take her eyes off him. "Hi. Sorry. Hi. I'll stand here and be a ghost."

"Come in," Reed said. "I'll go sit in the bathroom."

"You don't have to."

"I do," he said, kindly. "You're about to tell her something I shouldn't hear."

He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

I sat Gwen on the one clean chair and gave her a glass of water, which she held with both hands.

"I've been staring at this for a week," she said. "I didn't know what it was. I didn't want it to be what it is."

She opened the laptop and turned it toward me.

It was a system log, a gray column of numbers and file names.

She scrolled to a highlighted line.

"Network access log for the Research drive. September second. This is your folder, Jacqueline, the Calder archive on your desk machine. See the user?"

I read the name.

Sargent, C.

"At 2:14 a.m., someone logged in as Colby, from his own laptop, in the office. He copied your whole Calder folder to a private drive. Then at 2:31 he deleted the version history on yours."

"The log."

"The log," she said. "That's what you meant on Sunday. I looked, because you said it. I didn't know what I was looking for."

I put my hand over my mouth.

Eight weeks of carrying a number in my head that I could not prove, and here it was, a gray line, timestamped.

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