“What?”
“Yes, you, Crois. You’re hiding something.”
He shrugged and gave a vague gesture with his hands. “I’m an open book with you. All you have to do is ask.”
She smiled at him and that simple expression filled him with dread.
She pulled out her cell phone and keyed in the password.
When it was in, she brushed her fingers over the screen a few times before she turned the phone around for him to see it.
Crois took her phone into his hands and stared at the screen.
The hashtag that she’d searched for was CCPDHAWTCOP
It took a moment for him to realize what it was he was looking at. It was a picture of him, with the baby against his chest, his uniform shirt draped over the child.
He frowned as he looked at the image, trying to understand why PIlar was showing it to him besides the obvious hashtag.
“What’s going on?”
His partner sighed and rolled her eyes at him. She took the phone back from him and enlarged the image on the screen. Pilar pointed to some of the numbers under the image. There was a heart and the number after it was over five digits long.
“What’s that?”
“That,” Pilar explained, “is the number of times someone liked this picture.”
Crois frowned and brought the phone screen closer to his face. “Seriously? That many?”
Pilar sighed. “Yes. But that’s only one of the posts.”
“Wait,” he frowned as his brain tried to wrap itself around the idea, “there are more posts?”
“I gave up counting them,” she admitted, “but even those posts have shares in the high double digits.”
“Okay,” he spoke softly and slowly, “I wasn’t always the best in math at school, but that’s a lot.”
Pilar huffed. “That’s an understatement.”
“I can’t believe that anyone would care this much about a picture.”
“I guess you’re not on social media much.”
Crois frowned at the idea. “Try never.”
“How did I know that?”
Crois put the phone down on the tabletop and folded his arms across his chest. “Smart ass.”
He watched as she turned her phone off and tucked it into her pocket.
“I just think you need to be aware of this,” she explained. “You might have people commenting on it when you’re on the street working.”
“Why would they care?”
Pilar remained quiet.
Crois sighed. “I think you’re making too much of this.”
