♥
*
Misty's eyes locked on the computer. The pain in her hip had renewed itself, after sitting stiffly for more than an hour, and it set off alarm bells in her head. But more than that, she was looking at the computer.
"You didn't leave that for yourself, did you?"
Grant looked down at her as if he'd forgotten that she was there, though Misty knew that she was leaning on him heavily enough that he must have known.
"What? No."
He moved her automatically towards the computer chair; she followed, unsure how steady she was able to be on her own. He sat her down in the chair. As she sat down and eased back, she saw him reaching for his gun. She watched, more nervous than she felt comfortable being, but less nervous than she thought she ought to be.
He put a finger to his lips. She watched him turn, and then turned herself towards the computer.
Her lips pinched together. There were only three possibilities, as far as she saw it. First, a prank. The only person who could have been pulling it was Grant. Maybe he had someone else in his life who would pull it, but the look on his face wasn't the sort of expression that she expected from someone who suspected a prank.
Second, someone in the house. Granted, it was impossible to know from a glance how long the computer had been showing the screen. She could look to see if it had an auto-sleep. She turned around and did so. The monitor had the feature, but it was disabled. The computer's had been disabled, as well.
Which meant that if someone had accessed the computer locally, it could have been weeks ago. Months. She didn't know how often the place was checked, but from the smell she guessed it was somewhere between 'never' and 'once on a month of blue moons.'
She pursed her lips. Which left option 3. Remote access. It was hard to be sure. So she turned, pressed a few keys on the keyboard. The movements were so automatic that she wasn't sure what keys she pressed; if she had wanted to know, she could have slowed down and looked after she pressed them, but she couldn't begin to put words to it.
She scrolled through the list of active processes. She knew it wasn't any kind of guarantee that she would find anything. She didn't even know what she was looking to find. Her eyes drifted over something that set off alarm bells. She looked back. She couldn't say why, but there was something wrong with the name of the process.
She pulled open a browser window and searched. She had been right to be suspicious. So Misty cleaned up. She let out a breath. She didn't notice Grant come back in, holstering his pistol, until he set a hand on her shoulder.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking at your problem."
"Okay, what's that?"
"You had a virus."
"Virus?"
"Yeah," she said. "It was spoofing your–" she stopped. The words were coming out as automatically as her fingers had done their own work. Whatever had given her this expertise, it was from before the first thing she could remember. A part of her old life. The one that she had left behind. The life, however, hadn't left her behind.
So, she thought, letting out a breath and letting herself decompress, there were upsides to whatever it was that she'd gotten herself into.
Misty looked at the Sheriff's face. He looked at her like someone who thought that they were quite a capable swimmer going up against the Olympic team. He blinked. "And you think they have access to my computer?"
"Not any more," she said. Misty tapped a few more keys. She went by her gut, because her brain didn't know any more about what she was doing than Grant's. What she did know was that she could lean hard on herself, and it was working out better than she had expected. Now she just had to get herself out of a thousand other messes. Now that she'd gotten herself into a new one.
"Should I be worried?"
"Yeah," Misty said. "Probably."
"Okay?"
"Someone got in, somehow. You've got a weak link in your system, and that's a concern."
Grant looked at her with a cocked eyebrow. "And is there anything else I should do right now, to make sure that I don't get screwed up again?"
"Who comes into this place?"
"You're the third person on the list, behind me and the realtor."
"Short list of weak links, then."
"Yeah," Grant said. His eyes flicked to the corner, like he was thinking about something. Then he shook his head and shrugged. "So what do I do about this virus?"
"Do about–nothing. I dealt with the issue."
"And should I be concerned about anything else?"
She turned back to the computer, started an install. It went on in the background while she talked. "Yeah, sure. If there's one, there's usually more than one. But then again, this was a targeted attack, so someone must have known what they were trying to do. My guess? Probably an email, or something like that."
Grant let out a breath and settled onto the couch.
"How's your hip?"
"Hurts," Misty said. "But I think I'm going to live."
She clicked through a menu. It was mindless work, usually; the state that her hip was in made the whole thing agonizing. She watched the screen in a daze, wanting nothing more than the pain to go away.
Then something surprising happened. Her hand was pressed, for the moment, into her hip. But the mouse, with nothing touching it, no tremor, no wind, nothing to create a disturbance, moved. All on its own. The hunk of plastic on the table stayed put, but the cursor moved. Half an inch.
Misty let out a breath. Her heart thumped hard. Someone was there. Was accessing the computer at that exact moment. She thought she'd plugged the leaks. The fact that she had suspected there might be more didn't mean that she was prepared to find that she'd missed something so big.
She pushed the chair back, thoughts of her hip forgotten until she started to put her weight down on her feet. She fell to the floor, reached down and grabbed the ethernet cable coming out of the back of the tower, and she yanked it.
The pain exploding in her mind didn't dull as she eased herself back into what she thought would be a more comfortable position, holding a bright yellow cable. She hadn't been thinking; without depressing the clip that was supposed to keep it in, she might have broken the ethernet port right out of the board.
Instead, like it usually did, the plastic clip had snapped right off. It was probably lying somewhere in a corner where nobody was going to find it. But now she could work in peace, at least. She grabbed the arms of the office chair and started to lift herself up. When she felt a pair of powerful arms wrapping around her waist and heaving her up, it took her a moment to realize what was happening. When she did, though, she didn't want him to put her back down.
Misty's eyes drifted shut. There was a moment of blissful relaxation. Then the pain in her hip exploded. Misty let out an involuntary scream and tried to writhe on the couch that she was laying out on. Her hip didn't move under Grant's weight.
"I know it hurts," he said, through gritted teeth. The pain lessened from screaming agony to a dull, pervasive agony. "There. I've got it."
The feeling of her leg being sewn up was almost nothing at all, by comparison. When it finally closed up he wiped a cooling salve on it, and then tied a tight bandage around her leg. Misty let out a breath. The pain faded. But she was as awake as she'd ever been, now.
"Do you have anything to drink," she asked weakly.
"Nothing good," he said.
"Then give me something bad."
He let his weight up off her thigh. Misty struggled to sit up. Her body didn't really want to do it, but she quietly reminded herself that she hadn't asked her body's opinion on the matter.
"Don't get up," he told her.
"I didn't really ask you," she said. She forced her legs to take the weight. The pain wasn't as bad as it had been, but she'd been on her back for the better part of twenty minutes now, and the return of the pain, however lessened, was a surprise.
"You should stay off that leg."
"I've had worse," she said. There weren't many things that she could absolutely say about her life up to this point; whatever had made her forget, it had taken most of her history with it. The injuries, though, she had a good memory of, because there were plenty since the last she could remember. It had been a long year.
Grant looked at her, his expression a purposefully neutral one. "Do what you have to do, then."
"Thanks for your permission, Sheriff."
"Don't call me that here," he said. "If you're coming, come on."
He stepped into the kitchen. She followed behind. The limp in her leg was almost gone by the time that she made it. It hurt, but she didn't know herself as someone who let herself show pain. She hadn't been afforded the opportunity.
"We've got…" he pulled a jug of milk out of the fridge and looked at it. Then, without a word, he dropped it into the trash. "Water, two sodas, and a bottle of the cheapest stuff money can buy."
He pointed out the bottle. It was made out of plastic and filled with what looked like distilled water. She knew better than to believe that.
"We'll start with the soda and move on to the fire gut when the time is right," Misty said.
"Are you sure? With your hip."
"No," she said. "But this is the first time I've been able to relax for almost two months, and I'd like to spend it relaxing."
Grant looked at her. Aside from the nap, she'd been at it for twenty hours since she'd shown up at the station. She knew that it wasn't any different for him. But she'd been at it longer. This was just another in a long string of close calls. They seemed to be getting closer every time.
"You know what? You're right." He popped the can and handed it over to her. She drank. He opened his own and drank himself. It tasted over-sweet, but she wasn't going to complain. The caffeine hit her quickly, and it did its job, however little it was.
"So. Are you going to tell me anything?"
"Later," she said. "I'll tell you what I can when I can. But I can't now."
"If you say so."
Misty reached up. Her hip didn't let her reach the top of the fridge, where the vodka stood tall. She caught her weight and pushed herself back to the chair. Grant stood and reached up, pulled the bottle down, and opened the cap. It was the only thing that was used in the house, she noticed.
"What's the plan, then?"
"The plan?"
"What are we doing tonight? And tomorrow?"
"We're going to sleep tonight," he told her. He sounded tired, even in spite of the coffee.
"Okay. Where?"
"I'll take the couch," Grant said blankly. "You can have the bed."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
Misty thought about it. She needed to think things through. Her mind was racing, and yet the tires of her mind seemed to be stuck in the mud. Nothing moved forward. She needed time to collect herself. Time to calm down. And something else was bothering her, too. A vague feeling of discomfort that she couldn't put her finger on except to say that it was there.
"You know what, no." Grant looked at her, his eyebrow raised.
"No, what?"
"This is your place, I'm not making you sleep on the couch."
"I don't see what other option there is," Grant said slowly.
There was one option that immediately sprang to mind. She bit her tongue to stop herself suggesting it right away.
"I've already bled all over your couch. No reason to get my blood on your bed, too."
"You don't need to worry about that too much," Grant said. "Your leg is pretty well bandaged, if I might say so myself."
She agreed with him silently. "Still, that doesn't mean I can't tear something in the night. It's not like you're a surgeon."
"I have a basic medical training," he said, shrugging.
"My point is, I can pop a stitch in the night. It's far from unheard-of."
Grant looked at her, sipped his soda, and let his eyes drop to the table. "Yeah, okay."
"Good."
She stood up. Her weight swayed. How much of the liquor had she drank? She didn't really think about it.
"Do you need help?"
"No," she lied.
She made it the truth, the same way that she had the last hundred times that she'd asked herself the same question. She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, keeping the careful balance that was required to keep herself from falling between the floor moving under her, and her hip trying to keep her from putting her weight fully on the leg. But eventually she made it, and eased herself into bed.
A few minutes later, Grant clicked the kitchen light off, and Misty was left in darkness. Her eyes adjusted, eventually, and then eventually she closed them. Her breathing started to slow, then started to even out, and her worries, one by one, stopped bothering her.
Things were going to get worse, she knew. That was the way of the world, and there was no way around it. She was in too deep to try to return to a simple life as some man's wife. Settling down was an option that she'd surrendered for some reason, a long time ago. Now she was left to deal with the consequences. That was how it was going to be.
The pain faded into a vague inkling that it would hurt to put any weight on her leg, and she was left with nothing but the vaguest sense of unease. It started to coalesce into something, and it wasn't until it had completely shaped itself in her mind that she realized what it was.
She hadn't wanted someone as badly as she wanted Grant in her entire life. He was sleeping just a few rooms over, and the only things standing between them were thirty feet on her bad hip, and a lifetime of memories that she didn't have.
She didn't know which was more insurmountable.