“Sorry, I…. First thing tomorrow, I’ll run through the files again. Make sure I didn’t miss anything. But without full access….”
“As of today, you have it.”
Reese blinked at her. “Oh… okay. That’s… great.” He shuffled some papers around. “I guess then I’ll stay a few hours—”
“No.”
Reese squinted at her. “You don’t want me to stay?”
“I don’t need you to.”
“You don’t… are you firing me?” Although Reese wasn’t surefiringwas the right word because the military had sequestered him more than hired. The only reason he hadn’t tried to leave was after New World Genetics folded, his severance payments had dried up, and the monthly income from teaching high school biology hardly covered the light bill and groceries.
“No, Dr. Dante. I’m not firing you. I’ve simply made arrangements for you to work out of your home.”
Reese would have thought she was joking, except she didn’t have a sense of humor. “What happened to ‘this data is too sensitive to go beyond a controlled environment’?”
“The funds have been approved to circumvent all probable data breaches.”
Reese knew better than to think this was out of the goodness of her heart because she didn’t have one of those either. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch. I figured if you didn’t have to make the thirty-minute drive each way, another fifteen minutes in the morning waiting in line at a fast-food place to get coffee, another fifteen in line to get dinner on the way home, and worrying about the parameters on your aquarium, you’d have more time and focus.”
“You’re letting me work from home, so I have an extra hour and a half to go through this data?” There was also the level of trust Reese would have never expected from her. She had to be desperate to find whatever needle in a haystack she thought existed in the information recovered from the Utah Facility servers.
“I am.”
Of course she was.
Reese scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I want to be there when you do the installations, to make sure nothing gets into the tank. The corals are sensitive, and any loud noise might startle my fish.”
“It’s already been taken care of.”
“I’m not saying you can’t handle it. I’m say—wait. Taken care of?”
“Yes.”
“As in past tense. You’ve taken care of it. Not, you’re going to take care of it. Because one means you have it on your to-do list, the other means you’ve crossed it off. For that to happen, you would have had to go inside my house. And not figuratively, but literally. As in, inside, where you don’t belong, where…”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You went inside, didn’t you?” Anger made Reese’s tone brittle.
“Yes.”
“You went in my house, installed shit, and didn’t tell me?”
“What do you think I’m doing right now?”
“You know what I mean. You broke into my house—”
“I had a key.”
Reese gritted his teeth. “Stealing a key doesn’t make itnotbreaking into my house. You went in without invitation. You did stuff, I don’t even know what, to my Internet. No telling what kind of mess you left, and for all I know, half my fish could have jumped out of the tank because of the noise.”
“We did the installation three days ago.”
Three days? Reese had left early the past two just to make sure his fish were okay, and he hadn’t noticed a thing. Ripping out wires and installing new ones would leave sheetrock dust, wood shavings, and then take time to repair.