Page 72 of Sunsets at Seaside
He closed his eyes. “There are matches in the kitchen.”
“No, Jamie. You have to read this.”
He opened his eyes. “Read it to me.”
She shifted her eyes to him, and when she spoke, her voice was filled with compassion, and sorrow, and all the emotions Mark had written and been unable to say.
Jamie,
If you ever repeat this to anyone, I will take you down slowly and painfully.
Jamie shook his head.Mark. Idiot.
She continued reading.
You know I’m always right. Of course you do. I’m laughing, and know you are, too. It appears that in this instance, I jumped the gun. I know I went against your wishes by checking into Jessica’s background, but you also probably knew I would. We’ve known each other too long for you to expect otherwise. It’s why we make a great team. In these pages you’ll see that Jessica is everything she’s claimed to be, but I’ve found that she’s far more than you led me to believe, or maybe more than you were aware of. All that stuff aside, I’m truly sorry for the pain I caused you both. I know this is big. Huge. You love her enough to hit me, man. I owe you one for that, by the way.
Jessica paused and reached for Jamie’s hand. Their eyes connected, and he nodded, wanting to hear the rest of what his friend had to say. She cleared her throat before continuing, obviously as touched by Mark’s confession as he was.
I know you might fire me, and I wouldn’t blame you, but before you pull that card, remember this one. The dragon and the warrior, through thick and thin, and all things in between. Brothers until the end. Eyes to the sky, Dragon II.
Jessica set the papers on the table and sighed. “See? I guess he knows, or he’s learned, more about relationships, too.”
“Eyes to the sky.” Jamie shook his head with the memory. “We made that up when we were in college. Every time one of us did something stupid, or we broke up with a girl, or blew off a class, we said,Eyes to the sky. Eyes to the sky.We never even really defined what it meant. The closest we could come to defining it was to say that whatever we did, whatever mistakes we made, we’d keep moving forward, push ourselves harder to reach whatever it is we were going for at the time. Grades, graduation, business deals.” He laughed with the memory.
“What doesdragon and the warriormean?”
“Silly nicknames. You know, college stuff. I was the warrior, the one who braved cleaning up Mark’s reputation and moving forward with my life despite losing my parents, that kind of stuff. And he…” He shook his head with the memory. “He was always a bit of a snake when it came to women. So we called him the dragon, but that didn’t seem strong enough, so I dubbed him dragon II, like the biggest and ugliest of all—” Jamie’s eyes widened. “Holy cow. Baby. Baby, you’ve got to get up.” He patted her hips to hurry her from his lap.
Jessica stood. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything is right.” He took her hand and dragged her inside. “Come with me. I can’t believe it. That idiot solved the bug in our search engine.”
Jessica tried to keep up as he dragged her through the living room and the dining room, and into his office. “Sorry. I’ll explain.” He booted up his computer and handed her a throw blanket from a chair. “I keep it cool in here; you may need this. When I was in grad school, I put a little Easter egg in the code for the search engine.”
She sat on the chair across from his desk and covered her legs with the blanket. “What does that mean? I’m picturing bunnies and chocolate.”
“That’s because you’re the cutest person on earth.” His fingers flew across the keyboard as he cut through miles of cyber security to access the original code. “An Easter egg. A drone. A little piece of code that I created in grad school and totally forgot about until that darn letter.” He glanced up at her with no hopes of suppressing his relieved smile or the rapid beating of his heart. “This is the thing we’re looking for on OneClick that’s pulling up military equipment when kids type in the wordsdragon two.”
She gathered her hair over one shoulder and nodded, but her confusion was still evident in her eyes.
Jamie continued working. “We were kids, and to a computer geek, this type of stuff is fun.” He glanced up again to catch her smile. “I put this piece of code in the program and totally forgot about it. It was a joke, you know, that one day, just by the law of large numbers, eventually it would rear its head again and we’d laugh.”
“Law of large numbers?”
“Yeah, you know. A principal of probability and statistics. As the sample size grows—or in this case, the number of people searching for certain words—its mean will get closer and closer to the average of the whole population. The more people searching, the more the bug appears.”
He looked back down at the monitor. “And it’s been so long that when it happened, we didn’t laugh, because I totally forgot about it. I have to call Mark and tell him. I can’t believe this. It might have remained there forever, and there’s no way our coders would have known where to look.”
“Dragon Two? Isn’t that the name of a kids’ movie?”
He was too excited to slow down. “You’re right. That’s exactly why it’s coming up now. A million people are searching the termsDragonorDragon Twoon a daily basis.” He scanned the screen and typed faster. “I’m sorry, babe. I shouldn’t be working when we only have an hour or so left before our real world time starts, but this is vital.”
She came to his side and rubbed his shoulders while his fingers flew over the keyboard. “I love that you have a strong work ethic, and I love watching you work. I don’t want to take you away from any of this, Jamie.”
He slowed long enough to pat her hand, look up at her beautiful face, then went back to work. “You won’t. I can’t believe it took all of this for us to find this drone.” His hands slowed. “It took all of this.” He spun in his chair and wrapped his arms around her waist. “As much as I hate to think about it because of what happened to my parents, maybe things really do happen for a reason.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
