The sentence hung in the air between them.
“If you think about it,” Mack said after a minute, “the guy still hasn’t actuallydoneanything. He’s still just threatening us.”
“He broke into our house. He putcamerasin our house. He...trickedyou into committing... arson.” Hailey felt she was being generous there. “I think that counts as something. You said yourself the phone call was insane.”
“Yeah, but it’s a far cry from... from actually hurting someone.”
“Not such a far cry from sending those photos of you to the police. We need to get ahead of that. Waiting for someone to get hurt—someone else—doesn’t sound like much of a strategy to me. This is escalating; you have to be able to see that.”
Mack sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. Hailey had a flashback of him in the stacks in Perkins Library, grappling with an economics paper. She remembered being unable to fathom how he’d found the concepts so difficult; his brain just couldn’t think that way, he told her. He’d dropped the course shortly after that, the only one they’d ever taken together. Now it felt like he was still that same Hunter S. Thompson–worshipping nineteen-year-old, for all the help he was bringing to this situation.
“We’re going around in circles,” he said finally. “But if we had any idea who was doing this—I mean, if it’s not this David Rainier, are there other clients—”
“It’s not David Rainier. There are no other clients.”
“Okay. Then who else would do this?”
“Are we not going to talk about your father?”
He ignored her.
“This is someone with money to burn—forty-seven grand is not nothing to most people,” Mack began, like he was opening a lecture. “Plus the cameras can’t be cheap... and someone either paid for that hacking or really knows their way around a computer. You said that guy from your work just disappeared—”
“Dennis didn’t disappear. I spoke to Liz in HR. She couldn’t tell me much, but the gist was that he had burnout. Not exactly unheard of.”
“But what if he doesn’t have burnout? What if he’s lying? He’s a hacker, Hailey, you said—”
“Dennis does not have forty-seven grand in disposable income. I know what we pay him; the guy lives off Chipotle coupons. Besides, he has no reason to... Whoever is doing thishatesus, Mack. On a deep and personal level.”
“Some old associate of my father’s does not hate us on a deep and personal level.”
“What about one of his victims?” Hailey would not back down. Not now.
“It was a Florida real estate deal. It happened thirty-five years ago in God’s waiting room—his victims have been dead for three decades! And why would they hateme, anyway?”
He kind of had her there, and Hailey was about to admit this until he added: “But plenty of people hate you.”
It was such a simple statement, and yet it hurt so much.
Mack could clearly tell, because he backpedaled: “I just meant because of your job. Come on, there have to be a lot of angry husbands and wives. What about the Feldmans? The coffee lady?”
“What about Mackenzie Ewing?” Hailey said, before she could stop herself. She watched this land before she softened it just a touch: “What about one of your students?”
“You think a nineteen-year-old undergrad is bugging our house and threatening us?” Mack laughed. “At least the hacker has a job. Where would my students get forty-seven grand? I get that you want this to be my fault, but—”
“Mackenzie Ewing is a fucking debutante, Mack. You were partying with the Cleveland equivalent of Scarlett O’Hara, did you not know that? Didn’t you google your little girlfriend? Her father is one of the largest donors Tech has. How can you not know that? What if it’s a pissed-off parent doing this to us?”
“You know she wasn’t my girlfriend. Why would you even say that, when you know it’s not true?” His question was genuine, and it made Hailey feel even worse, which shouldn’t have been possible.
“You’d absolutely love it if this were my fault, wouldn’t you?” Mack said again as he got to his feet.
Hailey felt her pulse rise further; they might kill each other if they kept this up, but would he actually leave her here all alone in the house? She looked out through the huge family room windows into complete blackness and wondered how they could ever have survived this long without curtains.
Mack had only gone a few steps when his phone buzzed in his back pocket. He took one look at it, threw it toward Hailey, and ran for the stairs.
On the screen was a photo, almost too dark to make out, of Mabel on her bed sleeping, the hideous pink Jiggly Pet beside her.
Good luck tomorrow, read the caption.So much is depending on you!
