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17.
Ryan
Work is destroying me. Despite fooling around – and it is a foolish move on my part – with Alex, I’m still up to my eyeballs in work. Maybe it’s worse now that I’m so distracted with her.
Well, I’m more than distracted. I’m completely enamored. She’s terrible for me, but also delightful. Maybe I’m the one who’s terrible for her.
I have a few morning meetings, but in the afternoon, I decide to finally look into the information my mother gave me. I pull up her accounts, and I start reading. At first, I don’t find anything particularly interesting. There are a few things, of course. There are old emails from my dad. There are messages between the two of them that discuss everything from custody to business dividends to acquisitions of companies. I wonder why she didn’t delete these, but honestly, there’s really nothing particularly upsetting or surprising in them.
I realize that there’s nothing here that’s going to really help me figure out what I need to know as far as Project Sunshine goes. The emails are useless, at least. On a whim, I do a search through my mother’s emails for “Project Sunshine,” but nothing comes up. Then I try something else. I look for emails from Allison Green. Again, there’s nothing. There wouldn’t be, though. Allison didn’t come to work for us until six years ago. Before that, the person in Allison’s role was named Olivia Baker. I do a quick search for her name, and I find quite a few emails between her and my mother, and they’re almost all completely innocuous.
Then I find one that’s a little strange.
Juniper, we’ll get you the report on Project Sunshine by EOD Friday. Thanks for your input! -O
That’s it. That’s all the email says. I check my mother’s sent folder. She never deleted anything, apparently, and there’s a message from her to Olivia where she asks for more information on the project. Mom didn’t seem to remember anything about this, but before I call her a liar, I check other emails from the same day. Apparently, Mom was doing some kind of audit. She sent similar emails to all of the project managers. These emails were from twenty years ago: before the divorce. It’s insane to me that our servers have emails dating back this long, but that just goes to show how much useless data we have sitting around. We pay for it, too. Awesome.
Shit.
Should I have us do a digital audit? I probably should. We don’t need emails this old, but maybe we do. At least, this lets me know that Project Sunshine is at least twenty years old.
Sometimes I wish I’d done the same thing.
I keep poking around. There must be something in these files that will help me out, but all I can find at first are financials and random HR records. Then, after an hour, I stumble across something that makes me pause. It’s a file in a folder within a folder within a folder. It’s not labeled Project Sunshine. Instead, it’s called Project Cloudy.
What a stupid fucking name.
When I open it, it’s just one little memo, but it was written by my father. I read the entire thing once, twice, three times. Then I walk over to the trash can, and I throw up.
I need to call my brothers.
18.
Ryan
“Why are we here?”
Both Phoenix and Oscar are annoyed to be sitting in a random hotel room with me, but I can’t take any chances that someone might overhear us. Besides, I’m worried.
“I think my office might be bugged.”
