Chapter Two: What She Was Doing
Emma Reyes had been cleaning Lucas Hardin’s home office every Tuesday and Wednesday night for two weeks.
The job was through an agency, which meant she showed up, did the work on the schedule they gave her, and left without interacting with the household much if at all. Most of the residences on her route were empty when she arrived or had occupants who treated her the way people treat furniture — not unkindly, exactly, just without the particular attention you give to something that might have interior states.
Mr. Hardin had said hello twice and thank you once, which put him in the upper quartile.
She cleaned in a specific order — surfaces, floors, waste bins, windows — and she was fast because she had learned to be fast, because fast meant more routes per shift, which meant more hours, which meant the gap between what came in and what went out stayed manageable if not comfortable. Her mother’s medication cost what it cost. Her brother’s school fees cost what they cost. The math was not complicated; it was just constant.
She had not intended to look at the screen.
She had been moving the keyboard to clean the desk surface when the monitor had come back from sleep, and the code had been there, and she had looked at it the way you look at something in your native language in the middle of a foreign country — with an involuntary jolt of recognition. She understood what she was seeing. She had been understanding things like this since she was sixteen, sitting in the back of the computer lab at her secondary school while the teacher explained things she had already taught herself.
She had gotten two years into her computer science degree before her father’s illness and then his death had required a rearrangement of everything. She did not think of this as tragedy in the grand sense — it was simply what had happened, and what happened after that was what you did next, and what she had done next was find work that was available and reliable and that you could do at hours that accommodated everything else.
But she read code the way some people read faces — automatically, continuously, without particularly deciding to.
And the code on this screen had something wrong with it. Not obviously, not on the surface. But she had looked at it for approximately ninety seconds and she could see it the way you see a wrong note in a piece of music you know well: not because anything announces itself, but because something doesn’t sit right with everything around it.
She sat down in the chair.
She told herself she would just look more carefully. She told herself she would not touch anything. She told herself this for about forty-five seconds, and then she was typing, her hands doing what they knew how to do, her mind three steps ahead of her fingers the way it always was when she was working, the particular absorption of solving a problem that has a real shape and a real answer somewhere inside it.
She was so far inside the problem that she didn’t hear the door.
The first thing she heard was: “What are you doing?”
