“Will the phone allow you to try again?” Carolyn asked.
“I’ll be able to try again in twenty-four hours.”
“Okay, good. That’ll give me time to brainstorm more passcode ideas.”
Aurora snored quietly.
“Can you hack into the phone without a password?” Britt asked him.
“Not with the skills I have,” he answered. “You?”
“Nope,” Britt said. “I never did take up the hobby of hacking.”
“I could wipe the phone, but then everything on it will be lost, which defeats the purpose.” He lowered his brows as he considered Carolyn. “Uncle Frank must’ve been paying for this phone somehow. You never saw a charge on your family account?”
“No, and I would’ve noticed. Do ... Do you think he had a bank account in his name that I don’t know about?”
“Possibly.”
“If so, no statements from that account ever came to the house,” Carolyn said.
“He might have opted to go paperless with his banking,” Zander said.
“In which case, he could have managed the account by logging in on a computer or with an app on his phone,” Britt speculated.
“Which gives us even more motivation,” Zander said, “to figure out this phone’s code.”
A week passed.
A week during which Britt continued to hope that her dangerous crush on Zander would scatter on the wind and blow away.
The two of them went hiking in Olympic National Park.
The Bradfords helped Nora transfer the bulk of her things to John’s house so that she’d feel right at home when she moved in after the honeymoon.
Britt and Zander volunteered at Britt’s church, providing childcare to one-year-olds. The job exhausted them both so much that they staggered to Britt’s house afterward to chain-watch movies while making quips under their breath about the characters and plot in a bid to make the other one laugh.
Zander took Carolyn on a day trip to visit her daughters and help Courtney assemble her baby’s nursery.
Zander brought his laptop to Britt’s house one night, and they sat at her kitchen table, combing their computers for information about Emerson Kelly. They found nothing.
They visited the gym and powered through an interval workout on adjacent rowing machines that caused them both to pour sweat.
Every day, Carolyn and Zander tried—and failed—to crack the code on Frank’s cell phone.
And through it all, Britt’s crush on Zander remained.
It was as tenacious as a spring weed.
As strong as titanium.
“Did you ask Nora about tracking down Emerson and Ricardo’s arrest record for the theft of the Modigliani paintings?” Zander asked Britt on a stormy Thursday night nine days before Nora and John’s wedding.
“I did.” She’d made Korean spare ribs, daikon, and chrysanthemum greens for their dinner. They’d recently finished eating, and she was handing him dishes so that he could expertly load them into her dishwasher. Zander took the pursuit of perfect dishwasher loading seriously.
“She was able to find the arrest record,” she told him, “because they’re public and because she understands how to request them in the right way and in the right places. The record’s of no help to us, though. It only lists information we already know: Emerson and Ricardo’s names, the date and place of the arrest, and the charge.” Britt handed him the final two pieces of silverware and turned off the faucet.
He closed the dishwasher and straightened, a dish towel draped over one shoulder. He looked unreasonably appealing. Men who did dishes spoke her love language.
