Page 162 of Scrum Heat

“Is it Marcus? Denton Vale?” I ask, voice cracking.

“No,” he says, his voice quiet; and my brain just…stops.

“What?”

“It wasn’t them. The comments, the troll accounts, it’s… It’s not them.”

“But… all of it lined up,” I say, hearing the desperation in my own voice. “The timing, the escalation, the match tension, the rivalry, Marcus freakingexists—”

“I know,” Theo cuts in gently. “And I was so sure of it. We all were.”

“If it’s not them, thenwho?”

He doesn’t answer right away—just nudges the paper closer.

My eyes roam over it greedily as I take it from his hands. It’s a basic report; all clean formatting and black text on white paper. No bells, no whistles: just data.

Half of it means nothing at all to me. There’s lots of timestamps, usernames and emails, and then, halfway down the page—

Originating IP: 86.144.7.228

Location: Burnby Lane, Oakford

Device: Laptop, Residential

Registered Account: C. March

My stomach turns to ice.

No. No, no,no.

I know that address. I know that street. I used to write it at the top of school forms, practiced it in cursive when I was seven, just in case I got lost and someone needed to call her.

Burnby Lane. Oakford.

Home.

I blink hard. The letters blur, the words smear, and my brain flails, desperate to stitch this into something that makes sense—but it doesn’t.

“No,” I breathe. Theo watches me as I shake my head. “This—this has to be a mistake. Maybe—maybe someone spoofed the location. Maybe it’s a neighbor. Maybe the Wi-Fi is unsecured—”

“It’s not.”

I shake my head. “You don’tknowthat.”

“I do.” His voice is calm. Devastating. “We checked it. They’d already checked countless times before I got wind of it, and then I checked it three times myself. That’s… that’s the originating IP, Frankie. That’s the router. Same time stamps, same machine. Same house.”

I can’t breathe.

“How could she—why would she—?” I choke on the words. “It doesn’t make anysense.”

“I don’t know,” Theo says, and it’s the worst part—that he’s not defending her. That there’snothingto defend.

He sighs and rubs the back of his neck. “Some of the posts came from a secondary email. I’m pretty sure it’s Nigel’s.”

The name makes my skin crawl.

“Oh mygod,” I whisper, and then louder, sharper: “Are youkiddingme?!”

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