Page 35 of Hacking the Holidays
I shot to my feet, spinning to face him, my hands full ofbroken ceramic and my mind racing through possible explanations. The sudden movement knocked a stack of papers off his desk—they scattered across the floor in a cascade of white, sticking to the top of the coffee-stained carpet like wet leaves to pavement.
Sam stood three feet away, his expression somewhere between concerned and deeply suspicious. His eyes traveled from my face to the broken cup in my hands to the papers on the floor to?—
His computer.
I watched his gaze shift, saw the moment he registered his screensaver was gone, that his login screen was visible, that something was different about his workspace.
Luckily, he still hadn’t seen my flash drive plugged into his computer, but it would only be a matter of time.
“What were you up to?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral in a way that made my stomach drop.
The question hung in the air between us, sharp and dangerous.
What was I up to?
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
Sam took a step closer, his eyes never leaving my face, and I realized with absolute certainty that I was about to blow my entire cover over a spilled cup of coffee and a poorly timed hack attempt.
Chapter Nine
SAM
I was starting to think Rose came installed with some kind of walking Murphy’s Law generator. Was she genuinely this accident-prone, or was something else going on with her I wasn’t aware of? At this rate, I’d need to bubble-wrap the entire library before her next volunteer shift.
She stood motionless at my desk, clutching the remains of my favorite coffee cup like she was trying to figure out if superglue and wishful thinking could undo whatever had just happened.
Her expression screamed guilt—the guilt that suggested she’d been caught doing something far worse than accidentally breaking a piece of dishware. She still wasn’t answering what she was up to, and every instinct I had was firing warning signals.
This shouldn’t have been difficult. It was a simple question with what should have been a simple answer. Instead,she looked like I’d just asked her to explain quantum mechanics using only interpretive dance.
“I was—” She glanced down at the ceramic pieces in her hands, then back at me. “The cup. I knocked it over.”
“You knocked it over,” I agreed, staring at her intently. “How?”
“How?” she repeated.
“Yes. How did you knock over a cup that was sitting securely on my desk while you were sitting securely in my chair?” I gestured at the workspace behind her. “Walk me through the physics of this situation.”
Rose’s eyes darted to the desk, then back to me, her brain clearly working overtime to construct a narrative. “I was leaning over to look at your desk calendar, and my elbow caught the edge of the cup. Simple momentum transfer and spatial awareness failure. I do it all the time at home. Object in motion, laws of inertia, any given item meets gravity and a hard floor. Crash. Boom. Bang.”
The explanation was delivered with enough technical detail to sound credible, complete with confident eye contact and a casual shrug that suggested this was the most mundane accident in human history.
Except Rose’s pupils were dilated.
Her breathing was slightly elevated.
She was shifting her weight from one leg to the other.
There was something she wasn’t telling me.
“Interesting,” I said, crossing my arms.
Rose placed some of the broken pieces of my cup she’d been holding on my desk. “You’re not convinced.”
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
“You didn’t have to. Your micro-expressions gave you away—slight tension in your jaw, narrowed eyes, the way you crossed your arms in a defensive posture rather than a relaxed stance.”
