Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“Yeah. See?” he told me. “I was the good guy. I leaked the information where they stated, in writing, that they would rather pay out for lawsuits than take a hit to their bottom line and fix the tainted product.”
“That seems like a very good thing,” Arden concurred.
“Right? And I had memos and—”
“Or,” I countered, “instead of doing all that illegal hacking, you could have allowed the FBI agents—who already had a whistleblower from that company in protective custody and ready to testify—to do their job.”
He squinted.
I pressed on. “Your way was bigger, flashier, but the same justice was served in the same amount of time, was it not?”
“Yes,” Owen muttered under his breath. He had to agree because it was the truth. There had been no reason for him to interfere.
“And for that, and many more transgressions—”
“So many more,” Owen added with a sly chuckle.
“—you were in a world of shit,” I finished, scowling at him.
“I was,” he said with a sigh, then smiled at me. “And you showed up. Again.”
I had gotten a call from Sara’s mother. She didn’t know what to do. Owen was sad one minute, in a rage the next. He was fighting at school, he was failing twelfth grade, he wasn’t eating, he wouldn’t talk to them, and there was, she was fairly certain, a strange van parked down the street from their house.
When I got there, he’d already been taken into custody and was sitting in jail awaiting formal charges. He’d hacked into the Department of Defense database and was moving money from military projects to fund Planned Parenthood and Veteran Affairs and a slew of other very worthy causes, but the NSA had him dead to rights and pointed out that since he’d be eighteen in a month, he should be tried as an adult and go to jail for half his life. An example needed to be made.
Owen grimaced. “I was going to jail for at least twenty years, if not more.”
“Jesus, Owen,” Jing groaned. “This is why Jared was so up in arms about the DEA database thing, wasn’t it?”
“Can we not bring that up again?” Owen muttered.
“Keep going with the story,” Arden prodded him.
“Well, so they let Jared into the jail cell, and I was like, was he always that hot?”
I shook my head at him as Jing nodded and Arden laughed.
“That’s sick,” Dante said with a rakish grin. “That man could be your father.”
I turned to him. “What?”
Owen was laughing. “Come on, Jared. You with the shoulders and the chest. You sat down beside me, and I could barely get a word out with my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.”
“Could you just—”
“You have no idea,” he murmured, staring at me longingly. “And then when you told me I was getting out but I had to go to college right away, and you took care of me graduating and getting me into MIT, which was my dream school, where I had applied to go…I thought it was all too good to be true.”
“But you learned pretty quickly it was not.”
“Yeah. You had me under some pretty heavy surveillance, both in person and online. I could barely do anything if it wasn’t related to my coursework.”
“You had people following him at school?” Jing sounded horrified.
“Yes,” I replied adamantly. “And I had friends at the NSA monitoring him for me and didn’t stop until his second year at MIT.”
“Those guys still watch me, by the way,” Owen declared. “All the time.”
“But they don’t do it for me anymore. They do it because you’re on their watch list.”
He shrugged. “Things happen.”
They did. But most importantly, Owen had straightened out his life after starting college. He found a wonderful therapist, made friends like Maggie, opened himself up to people and experiences and was no longer a loner, no longer a man without human connection. Along with his own hard work, through giving him a second chance and getting him in school, I’d helped make him whole again, and that was all I ever wanted.
“What about your grandparents? Do you still see them?” Jing asked him.
“I used to spend all my holidays from school with them, and that was good for them—seeing me grounded and doing well.”
Jing nodded.
“My grandfather passed away the year I got my master’s, and my grandmother went to live with my aunt Kate, her oldest daughter. I saw her a few months ago, and she’s great.”
“Oh,” Jing said with a happy sigh. “I love this story.”
“The beginning was horrible,” Arden remarked, “but the ending makes up for it.”
It certainly did.
We all cleaned up except Dante, since he’d cooked, and he watched us all, then passed out on the couch.
Arden was watching a movie, and Jing walked the grounds to make sure everything was secure. Owen had to Skype with Maggie because she wanted an update. He couldn’t tell her everything, but he could explain about being kidnapped and me finding him. That, he said, was the important part anyway.