Page 70 of Destroyed With You

“I don’t know. But I’ve got the prints set up, I’ve got the temperature set up, and I’ve got a tiny electrical circuit inside the finger to simulate a pulse. You said it was important. I don’t want to take any chances with whatever it is you’re trying to recover.”

“I appreciate it,” I say. “I don’t have any way to assess the viability of my information, but I was told that any wrong move and this information will self-destruct. And we really need to know what’s on that laptop.”

“Do you want me to try and unlock the machine myself?”

I glance at Winston. I don’t want anything to go wrong, but I also worry about someone other than the two of us seeing what might be on that screen. As I anticipate, Winston seems to read my mind.

He shakes his head. “Thanks anyway, buddy. I think you’ve done enough. If it fucks up now, there’s not anything you could do to stop it, is there?”

“No,” Noah says, “there isn’t. So I may as well leave you two to curse me in absentia.” He pushes his chair back away from the table and Emma does the same

“Are you heading into Austin?” she asks. “I hired a car from the airport, so I could use a lift.”

I glance between them and then over to Winston. “I didn’t mean to run you guys off so quickly,” I say.

“Of course you did,” Noah says. “You need to get on with this.”

I shrug. “Guilty as charged. Go away.”

They both laugh, and Winston and I walk them to Noah’s car. I give Emma a hug, then Noah. “Thank you for doing this and for not asking questions. Any more than you needed to anyway.”

He tightens the hug and bends in close to my ear. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I do know that man is head over heels for you. I know because I see on his face the same thing I see in the mirror when I’m thinking about my wife.”

I step away, my eyes down. Not sure if I should be annoyed or insulted or what. The truth is, Noah's words make me happy. I raise my head, give him a small smile and a shrug.

Winston shakes hands with Noah, then kisses Emma’s cheek.

We watch as they back out of the drive, then turn to go back inside. As we do, Winston reaches for my hand, then stops, lowering it slowly. “Are you still pissed?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No, you were right to back away. We need—at least, I need—time to figure it out. Us, I mean. And I don’t think either one of us has the bandwidth while we’re in the midst of all this.”

It’s probably a cop-out, but I’m not ready to think about what Emma or Winston have said to me about the past meshing with the present. About emotional truths and literal lies.

I want him—that’s undeniable—but beyond that, I’m still stumbling with our reality.

“So you’re saying no,” he clarifies. “But you’re not saying it forever.”

“I’m saying no for now,” I confirm. “And I guess we’ll go from there.” I flash a saucy grin to lighten the moment. “Unless you just want the sex part now. I can live with that.”

“I’m ignoring that,” he says, but he’s grinning when he extends his hand. “No, for now. It’s a deal.”

Relief floods my body as I take it, accepting an unspoken truce as we go back inside.

The laptop is still in my tote bag where it’s lived ever since we left the Stark Century Hotel. Now, I take it out and put it on the bed in our room. I don’t want to go back to the kitchen table in case Winston’s parents come home. “It just occurred to me that we don’t have a charger for this thing. What if the battery’s dead?”

Winston shakes his head. “There’s no charging portal. The thing runs on regular double A’s. Believe me, my mother has plenty of those lying around the house.”

I laugh. “I guess I’m not surprised. He didn’t want anything electronic coming into that machine. Any possible way to hack it, and he closed it off. Can you hack something through the electrical line?”

Winston shrugs. “Above my pay grade,” he says.

“Enough stalling. You ready?”

I nod, then open the laptop and press the power button. The screen lights up and, as we’d expected, there’s a message demanding that fingerprint access be obtained within the next sixty seconds or else the machine is going to shut down. Three attempts to start without fingerprint access and the information on the hard drive will be erased.

“Here goes nothing.” Winston takes the plastic finger and gingerly presses it onto the keypad. I reach over and squeeze his leg as he sits on the bed beside me. We both hold our breath and then there’s a click and a whir and for a moment I think the screen is going to fade into grizzled static. But then, as if by magic, suddenly we see a single folder icon. It’s labeled Hawthorne.

“I can’t believe it worked.” I realize I’m whispering. I take a breath. “Click it.”