Page 118 of The Temporary Bride

At work, the hours feel longer. My mind keeps drifting back to her. I catch myself staring at the photos of us on my desk, remembering her laughter, the way she moves through a room. It’s like her absence has turned up the volume on everything else, every sound and sensation sharper than it should be.

The day before Chloe is set to return drags. I’m in my office, my thoughts on the moment when I’ll see her walk through the door again. I’m just about to pick up my phone to text her when it rings.

Expecting it to be Chloe, I pick up with a smile, already in a better mood at the thought of hearing her voice. “Hey, you.”

“Mr. Thorne.”

The voice on the other end isn’t my wife’s. It’s a curt, professional tone—John Davidson, the head of IT. My smile slips into a frown. His name on my screen at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon is not a good sign.

“I’m sorry to call like this.” His voice has a careful, clipped quality as he informs me, “We’ve had a security breach.”

Fuck.

I set my pen down on the contract. The tip leaves a small ink blot where it lands. “Talk to me.”

“Someone accessed proprietary files and downloaded them. It looks like it happened several days ago. We caught it late, and I apologize for that, but we’ve closed the access point that was used. Whoever it was shouldn’t be able to pull anything further.”

“Which files?”

“We’re still compiling the full list. I’ll have it to you within the hour.”

“Who accessed them? How did they get in?”

“Still working on both. The logs are giving us information but not the complete picture yet. I’ll call you back the moment I have more.”

We hang up, and I push the contracts aside and turn my chair toward the window. The city is going about its afternoon fourteen floors below, and I watch it all sightlessly as I wait with my hands tightly clenched on the desk.

My inbox chimes twenty minutes later. Subject line: List of Accessed Files.

I open the attachment and go through it slowly, line by line. By the time I reach the bottom, I’m sitting very still with my jaw tight.

It’s everything. The full expansion strategy for the coming year, every market we’ve been quietly positioning ourselves in, the specific clients we’ve been courting and the terms we’d been discussing with them, the market research reports we paid significant money to commission, the financial projections, the complete operational blueprint for how we intended to execute on every major initiative my brothers and I have spent the better part of a year building. All of it, downloaded, sitting on someone else’s hard drive right now.

I lean back in my chair and press a fist to my mouth, looking at the ceiling.

This isn’t a minor breach. This is someone handing our entire strategic position to whoever they’re working for, and whoever that is now has a detailed map of where we’re going and exactly how we plan to get there. It’s going to cost us. The only question is how much.

I’m still going through the list, making notes on what we can move on quickly and what’s already too exposed, when Davidson calls back. I pick up on the first ring, and I can tell from his silence before he speaks that whatever news he’s about to give me is worse than what he’s already delivered.

“We traced it,” he says. “We know which machine the files were downloaded to.”

“And?”

“It was a desktop computer in the MediaSphere offices.” He lets a beat pass before he finishes. “It’s registered to… to Chloe Thorne.”

The air goes out of the room. What the fuck?

I straighten, my grip on the phone tightening. “Say that again.”

“The downloads were traced directly to her workstation, Mr. Thorne. We’ve checked the logs twice. That’s where it leads.”

“Keep digging,” I tell him, working hard to keep my voice level as the words scrape past my throat. “Timestamps, access method, every log you have. All of it.”

“Understood. I’ll send everything over.”

I hang up without saying anything else, my chest going tight. I put the phone down on the desk, staring at the screen as I wait for his report to come through, a cold numbness spreading through me.

Chapter 44