“Evidence.” Parker’s voice was vibrating with excitement. “I traced the digital breadcrumbs. Someone didn’tjust leak your identity, they’ve been monitoring your accounts for months. Like, since last semester.”
“What?” Why would someone at FlixNChill be monitoring me way back then? We hadn’t started talking to them until January.
“And I think whoever it is had actual access to your laptop. Because if they’d hacked in from the outside, I would have known.” She shook her head, and I’d never seen Parker so upset. “I’m sorry, Temp, I should have caught it. But this was a serious inside job, man.”
I grabbed her and hugged her tight. “This is not your fault. No way. This is a downright devious inside job.”
But I refused to believe any of my sorority sisters would have betrayed me like this. They were all genuinely happy to find out I was Miranda Milan. No, the only people who were upset about it were my family.
Well, and Mrs. Henderson. She was so scandalized by the whole thing, she’d not only quit talking to me, she wouldn’t even look at me. Even weirder, we hadn’t had any surprise room inspections. Those had been her favorite thing to do all year.
“Could... could it have been Mrs. Henderson?” What did she know about hacking someone’s email?
“She has access to the whole house and no one would blink twice if she went into anyone’s rooms. She does love her room checks. But no way she did this on her own.” Parker narrowed her eyes into her thinking face. “I have an idea.”
She grabbed her laptop from the desk and typed away. Footage from the sorority house’s front door camera popped up with a time stamp from last fall. “Iknow exactly what day you were hacked and this is a long shot, but maybe we can see if Mrs. H had any visitors that day.”
“Unless they’re wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I hate Miranda Milan’ we’re not going to?—”
Right there at nine twenty-four in the morning, when both Parker and I had a class last semester, was my sister, Rosalind, standing at the front door to the sorority house, looking over her shoulder while waiting for someone to answer.
Okay. It could be nothing. Dropping something off? But all she had was her regular messenger bag slung over her shoulder. Maybe she just stopped by to see me? Not that she ever had before. I waited to see if she left after finding out I wasn’t home.
But Mrs. H answered the door and the two of them talked for a moment. Then Rosalind reached into her bag and pulled out a book, showing it to our house mother.
It was my first book. Even in grainy black and white, I knew that cover anywhere. It had changed my life. I froze. “She read my book?”
Their conversation continued, though we couldn’t hear anything. But Rosalind went inside and no one looked happy.
My stomach churned with the bitter bile of betrayal. I didn’t know for sure if she’d done it. In fact, I was still hoping it was just a coincidence. But I was going to find out.
Casa Navarro was quiet when I arrived. According to a text from Freddie, everyone else was out except Rosalind, who was studying. Law school and the internship she hadthis summer with the senator always took precedent over everything else.
I found her in her room, surrounded by case files and notepads filled with her neat, precise handwriting. She looked up when I entered, surprise quickly replaced by wariness.
“Tempest. What are you doing here?”
I closed the door behind me. “We need to talk.”
“I’m studying.” She gestured to her books. “Can it wait?”
“No.” I pulled out a printout of the door cam footage showing Rosalind holding the book out to Mrs. Henderson. “It can’t.”
Her eyes flickered to the photo, then back to my face. “What’s that?”
“Are you the one who leaked my identity to the press?”
Rosalind didn’t immediately deny it. And that bile rose up the back of my throat. Instead, she carefully closed her notebook and set it aside.
“How did you find out?” she asked, her voice controlled.
I sat on the edge of her bed, studying this sister I thought I knew. “Why, Ros? Why would you do this to me?”
She was quiet for a long moment, as if choosing her words carefully. “Ophelia left a copy of your dumb book here last year, and I picked it up for something mindless to read.” Her mouth twisted. “I didn’t know it was yours, of course.”
“Until you recognized Catalina in the heroine.”
A flicker of surprise. “Yes. The way she could never bewrong, that oh, so Catalina way of lauding her superiority around because she’s the oldest. It was too specific. Too familiar.” She shrugged. “So I started looking into Miranda Milan.”