Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 106150 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 425(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106150 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 425(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
“It’s not illegal. All employees know Sterling Chase email accounts are subject to oversight by management and HR,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but would he be stupid enough to use company email?” Rowe asked at the same time Kenji said, “I mean his personal email, Bash.”
“Oh.” I thought about it for a moment. “Do we have any hackers on speed dial?”
Rowe opened his mouth like he was about to say something, then shut it again.
“What?” I prompted.
“Well… if Austin’s stupid enough to use his work computer to check his personal email or messages—like, from Slack, or Facebook, or even his texts—you could remotely install a keystroke tracker and see his activity.” He held up a hand before I could pepper him with questions. “Yes, it’s legal to install a keystroke tracker on company-owned computers. I don’t know specifically about New York laws, but most employee privacy laws don’t protect personal email if it’s accessed on a company-owned computer or on a company-owned network. In other words, the company has a legal right to all data created, viewed, or managed on the computers they own.”
“Holy shit. Thank you, Bobby’s Tech Barn,” Kenji said excitedly.
Rowe laughed. “Bobby acts as the IT department for a couple of local companies. Miss Melly was very concerned that one of the ladies from her yarn shop was watching porn during work hours. It turned out that she hadn’t accessed anything more exciting than cat videos. But we did the same thing at one of the local credit unions, and they were able to prosecute a teller for fraud,” he said proudly.
“Kenji, who do we trust in IT who could do this?” I asked.
“Rachel Reynosa,” he said without hesitation. “She can help us, and she’s no fan of Austin’s.”
“Perfect. See if she can call us today. I’m happy to authorize overtime.”
While we waited for Rachel to contact us, Rowe pulled up his cloud storage account to walk me through his research for Project Daisy Chain and even showed me his early notebooks of ideas. If I’d been impressed with the man before—and I fucking had—it was nothing compared to how I felt after seeing the enormous amount of research he’d compiled. Document after document, page after page, told the story of his dedication to making this project a reality. There were articles from medical journals, screenshots of newspaper headlines, reams of notes from his conversations with the Montgomery County and Tippecanoe County Health Departments, email after email from hospital administrators. And that didn’t even begin to touch the literal hours of interviews he’d recorded.
Still, when he showed me the earliest incarnations of the app he’d coded, Rowe seemed almost apologetic. “It’s so basic and clunky. I really had no clue what I was doing—”
I grabbed him by the back of the neck and kissed him on the mouth, stopping the apologies with my lips. “Rowe, some people go to school for years and don’t manage anything this incredible. The idea that you managed this on your own… is there nothing you can’t do if you put your mind to it?”
He gave me one of his gorgeous blushes. “Some things are still pretty hard for me to understand,” he whispered. “Like how I slid into an alcove behind a potted plant a week ago and ended up here with you right now.”
“I’m just glad that you did,” I said firmly.
Our burgers arrived, and we worked as we ate, taking turns stealing each other’s french fries as we carefully assembled the key pieces of information to send to Sterling Chase’s head attorney. At my urging, Rowe also copied all of his data to an additional cloud storage account to make sure it was well backed up for his own protection.
By the time Rachel contacted us, Rowe and I had finished cleaning up our meal—a process that took a lot longer than it should have since my wet, soapy hands insisted on going lots of places besides the kitchen sink—and he was standing in my personality-less living room, gesturing wildly as he talked about feng shui and golden ratios with every bit of the same excitement that he’d talked about polo hooks and penalty points.
Every word out of his mouth, every second in his presence, made me feel alive. Like the world was filled with more possibility than I’d ever let myself recognize. And for the first time, I started to see how my own attitude toward money had held me back. I was like Aladdin’s genie—phenomenal power and money at my fingertips but shackled by my own ideas… until Rowe had set me free.
“I love it,” I told him when he finally finished speaking, before his nerves rushed back. “I agree with everything you’re suggesting. Let’s make it happen.”
“You sure?” Rowe asked, waving around the room as if his ideas had already manifested inside the space. “I mean, you’re gonna have to do some of the work.”