“Haven’t heard that in a hot minute.”
Seb doled out nicknames like they were going out of style. At leastthathadn’t changed.
“Are all the students at Harvard brain trusts? I’ve often wondered if you felt like a little fish in a big pond, or if you could go toe-to-toe with rich smarties.”
“You often wonder about me, do you?”
He chuckled softly. “Probably more than you wonder about me.”
His eyes found mine, and my mouth went dry, completely thrown by his blurted sincerity. It occurred to me how close we were, leaning over the table, knuckles almost touching. And then Seb shook his head, like jolting himself out of a stupor.
“Come on, Paige. We got a piece of paper filled with numbers. What do you see? What’s the pattern?”
I sighed heavily and stared at the envelope. “Hold on... Were there any pauses in the dots? Breaks?”
He picked up the certificate and studied it. “Hard to tell since it was handwritten God-knows-when. Wait, wait, wait...” He held up a hand, staring at the paper. “How many numbers did I read off?”
“Seventy-two.”
Seb did some not-so-quick math inside his head, then got frustrated and demanded the envelope. He started counting the numbers with one finger and then looked at me, wide-eyed. “Holy shit. Is this a book cipher?”
Was it?Impossible.
If someone wanted to send coded text, they might find all the words they want to use in their secret message inside a book. Like, let’s sayWebster’s Dictionary. If the word “asshole” is needed for the secret message, and that word is on page twenty,on the seventh line, and it is the first word on that line, the cipher code would be 20/7/1. When the recipient gets the message, it will look like a string of numbers grouped into threes. They take out theirWebster’s Dictionary, find page twenty, line seven, first word, and bingo! They would know that the sender is calling them an asshole.
The numbers we’d just deciphered might be a book cipher.
Might.
“Only one problem,” I said. “If it’s a book cipher, we’d need to know the exact book that was used to write the message.” Both the sender and recipient of a book cipher would need to agree on a book to use for coding and decoding.
“Yeah, that’s a problem, all right. Maybe it’s not even a book cipher. It might be something else, like an A1Z26 cipher, or some kind of Caesar shift variant with numbers.”
“True...”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket when it dinged, squeezing his eyes closed briefly. “Shit. Sorry, Paige. Gotta go.”
“What?Now?” Was he not as excited as I was about this discovery? How could he leave right in the middle of it? “Is it an emergency, or something? Your father?”
Seb patted his dog, encouraging her to get off the sofa with him. “Fortunately, no. Things have calmed down between me and my pops these days... as long as we stay out of each other’s way. If he doesn’t see me, then he doesn’t ask where I’ve been.”
“So you’re avoiding each other.”
He shrugged. “Hey, you call it a tomato, I call it ‘getting to keep my head on my shoulders.’ Which I’d like to continue doing because I’ve grown pretty fond of this head.”
Seb’s father was a Coast Guard captain—decorated, a localhero. He was also incredibly strict. Two years ago, when the man sent Seb away, it wasn’t a big surprise to any of us. Seb’s mother left both of them when Seb was nine; one day she woke up and decided she didn’t want to be a wife or mother, so she abandoned her life here and moved out east. Pretty much just disappeared from their lives. I don’t think Captain Jansen ever got over it, and he certainly didn’t know how to raise a rambunctious boy on his own. But that was no excuse for why he lorded over Seb.
I’d never been a Captain Jansen fan.
“You can’t leave now,” I told Seb. “What about the cipher?”
He took a picture of the numbers I’d scrawled on the envelope. “Promise I’ll take a look at the code later and let you know if anything comes to mind.”
“Okay?” I replied, sounding as unsure as I felt.
He gave me a little smile, cocked to one side like he was hiding a thrilling secret. And for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him at the bonfire, two boyish dimples appeared, indenting his cheeks.
I always loved those dimples.
