He Married His Hometown Neighbor, Then Begged for a Second Chance novel · Chapter 3 of 40

Chapter 3: Visitor Access

Evan's first day at Ross Group: a warm tour from Maya, a badge that says Director but opens nothing, and the discovery that Maya's new tracker is his own old code with the names changed.

The Ross Group tower had forty floors of glass and a lobby the size of a church.

Evan walked into it on Monday at eight in the one suit he owned, and the security desk looked at him for a long time.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"I'm starting today. Evan Green."

"Of course." The guard's face changed. "Mr. Ross's husband. Please wait here."

Everyone in the lobby turned to look, then turned away too quickly.

Maya came out of the lift in a yellow blazer, with both hands out.

"There he is. Welcome, welcome. Did you sleep? Did Ethan feed you? He doesn't know how."

"There was oat milk," Evan said.

She laughed with her whole face.

"I'll bring you groceries. Come on, I'll show you everything."

She walked him across the lobby with her arm through his, talking about the building, the view, the cafeteria on thirty-one.

She introduced him to three people by first name and forgot to say what he did.

On the twentieth floor she stopped at a glass door and handed him a white plastic badge on a blue lanyard.

DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY, it said, under his photograph.

The photograph was from the courthouse, with the carnation still on his lapel.

"I had the badge made over the weekend," she said. "It's a little much, I know. The board wanted it."

"Thank you."

"Try it. It's lovely when the door opens."

Evan held the badge against the reader.

The light on the reader turned red.

"Oh, silly me," Maya said. "I put you on visitor access. The system defaults to that for new hires, and I haven't had time to change it. I'll sort it out this week. Security audits."

She said it so easily that he nearly nodded.

She swiped her own card, and the door opened for her.

"Come in, come in. You're with me today."

The engineering floor was an open room with long white desks, thirty monitors and a map of the world on the wall with small red lights on it.

Every head went up as they entered.

Then every head went back down, but slowly.

"Everyone, this is Evan," Maya said, "Ethan's husband. He's going to sit with us for a few weeks and see how it all works."

A man at the back mouthed the word *husband* to the man beside him.

A woman near the window smiled at Evan, kindly, and went back to her screen.

"Ethan's popping down," Maya said. "Evan, you can have this desk by the printer. It's very quiet."

It was a desk with no monitor.

There was a mug on it that said WELCOME, EVAN in careful marker.

Evan sat down.

The mug was warm. Someone had filled it with coffee.

That was a nice touch, he thought.

He drank it and watched the floor.

He did not need a monitor.

From the desk by the printer he could see four screens across the room, and one of them was a code review window left open by a young engineer who had gone for a bagel.

It showed a module called TRACE-LOOP.

Evan read it from forty feet away.

A tracker that followed an attacker backward through a system, hop by hop, and tagged them.

It was clean, and clever, and very familiar.

He stopped chewing.

There was a shortcut in the third loop, a way of skipping a hop that had already been checked, using a counter that ran backward.

He had written that trick on his bedroom floor in Millbrook at nineteen years old, with a plate of his grandmother's toast, and posted it online under another name.

He knew it on sight.

The variable names had been changed.

Somebody had replaced his *hopsLeft* with *traceRemaining* and his *seen* with *visited*.

The comments had been stripped.

The counter still ran backward, and a stranger had taken credit for it.

Evan put the mug down very gently.

The young engineer came back with the bagel and sat down in front of the screen.

"Is that yours?" Evan asked.

The engineer glanced over his shoulder, and then straightened up, startled to be spoken to.

"The Trace module? No, it's from Maya's team. It's the heart of the new Aegis build."

"It's neat."

"It's wild, right? Maya says she wrote the core of it herself, on a plane."

"On a plane," Evan said.

"Over the weekend. Before the funeral." The engineer lowered his voice. "She's kind of a legend."

Before the funeral was seven months ago.

Evan looked at the red lights on the wall map and did not say anything.

A tall shape came through the glass door.

It was Ethan, in a black suit, with two board members behind him.

The floor went quiet.

Ethan walked down the room without looking at the desks, and stopped in front of the one by the printer.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning."

"You found it."

"I found the printer."

A few people laughed.

Ethan didn't. He looked at the mug, then at the lanyard, then at the empty place where a monitor should have been.

"We'll get you a screen," he said to nobody.

"Maya's sorting out my access."

"Good." Ethan nodded to the room. "My husband is here to observe. He's to be shown whatever he asks, within reason. And he's not to touch the systems."

He said *my husband* in the voice he'd used for *it's the clause*.

Evan heard the difference now.

"Understood," he said.

Ethan stood there a moment longer.

Then he walked on, and the board members followed him, and the floor got loud again.

At the next desk a woman whispered to a colleague, "He looks so young."

"He looks like he's from a farm," said the colleague, and they both pressed their lips together.

The young engineer was still staring at the screen.

He frowned.

"Funny," he said, half to himself. "Those loops. The old Thorn repository uses the same counter. I always thought it was a coincidence."

The bagel stopped halfway to his mouth.

Evan held very still, and his fingers closed on the blue lanyard.

"Thorn?" he said. "The hacker?"

"The legend. Nobody's seen him in four years."

"Evan!" Maya was at his shoulder, all sunshine, a cup in each hand. "I forgot to ask how you take it. Coffee?"

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