Jane’s mom was sitting in her usual spot, elbows resting on the kitchen table. A plastic cup lay near her hand, and a newspaper was held in the other. Jane cleared her throat as she entered.

“Oh, you were out late,” her mother said, glancing at the clock.

Jane eyed the cup on the table. She hoped it wasn’t what she thought it was.

She opened the fridge, glancing inside. The pickings were sparse, with a single jar of pickles and what must have been a loaf of bread at some point. Jane sighed as she shifted the loaf away, next to a row of high-proof beers.

With a clink, she shut the fridge. Her mother exhaled behind her as she drank deeply from her cup.

Something felt different. Call it sleep deprivation, or the after-bite of adrenaline, but Jane felt unusual. Braver. And a little frustrated.

“Are you drinking again?” she asked, the edge of her voice slightly harder than she’d intended it to be.

Her mother turned from her newspaper, eyes wide. “No, baby, not tonight.”

It was clearly a lie. Her mother’s words slurred like that of a stroke patient, her eyes bloodshot and shiny.

Jane opened her mouth to reply, an impulse, but stopped herself.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” her mother asked. She seemed concerned, even through the bleariness of the booze.

“Nothing, I-” Jane realized she had responded automatically, as she had to the same question so many times before. She blinked. She obviously couldn’t tell her mother about the shady undercover policeman that had tracked her down on the street.

She took a seat, next to her mother. “A boy asked me out.”

Her mother lowered the cup, amusement in her red-rimmed eyes. “Really? That’s wonderful, Jane.”

Yeah, Jane thought, just wonderful.

“How…” Jane swallowed, imagining Ryder’s angular face. “How did you and dad meet?”

Her mother’s eyes, once again, widened in surprise. That had been the last question she’d expected.

“Well. Me and your father, we were both in high school when we met. Sophomore year. It was a different time then.”

Her mother had a wistful look on her face. A longing for better times. “He wasn’t the most popular boy. I mean, you can tell, can’t you? All skinny and with that red hair of his. But I liked it. I liked him. I thought he was the most handsome devil in the world,” her mother continued. She took a sip from the cup.

“We met at the science fair. He’d made some kind of computer-controlled toy car. Back then, it was pretty rare to find computer-based toys. I remember, he was so proud of himself. He’d worked so hard on that little thing.”

Jane had a vague idea of what she was talking about. She remembered the toy, a plastic car in a glass casing, one of her father’s many knickknacks. They’d left it behind when they moved to Alexander.

Her mother was running her finger over the lip of her cup. “He was really smart, your father. You get that from him. Smart and awkward. I remember him tripping over himself, trying to explain to me what a transistor was on our first date. I kissed him just to shut him up.”

“Mom!” Jane exclaimed, flushing.

Her mother laughed. “But, my point is, we never would have met if I hadn’t spoken to him first. If I hadn’t gone with my heart, and asked him out. That was scandalous back in the day, you know! Only the boys were allowed to do that.”

She drained the cup. Jane caught a whiff of its contents, an acrid chemical smell.

Her mother looked at her, seriously this time. “Always trust your gut, Jane. If I did with your father, maybe…”

She had trailed off, her eyes distant. But Jane understood what she had meant to say.

Maybe dad would still be around, if they’d known.

Jane’s gut, for the most part, was begging her to sleep. She had just entered her room, and her mattress called to her near-irresistibly. She yawned as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

But there was work to do. The feeling was there again, prickling at her gut, rousing her from her exhaustion. Things needed doing, secrets needed uncovering. Thumb drives needed plugging into her laptop.

She trudged towards her desk and took a seat in her office chair, bare feet resting on the wheels. She had brought her bag with her, and within it, her laptop. She mused for a few moments on how it was always by her side, a constant fixture of her person. Like an extension of herself.

Jane shook her head. Sleep deprivation. Focus, Jane.

She swiped the thumb drive from her pocket, a tiny metal rectangle protruding from innocent red plastic. One would never guess that it held the only copy of Beatrice Ruth’s family contact information.

The few seconds it took for her laptop to recognize the drive felt like an eternity. Her eyelids drooped, heavy over dry eyes. She was slumping over in her seat.

It had been an exciting night, to put it in few words. She was feeling the after-effects of the adrenaline, and fear, and giddiness. Ryder’s casual proposal echoed in her head, his voice muted inside the nurse’s reception area.

She opened the file explorer on her computer, quickly selecting the drive. The file, thankfully, was still intact. She opened it.

Much like before, an extensive list of student names and corresponding contact information filled her screen. A spreadsheet of numbers, addresses, and parent’s names. Once again, she activated the search function of her document reader, and entered Beatrice’s last name.

Two pings. Exhaustion abating under the weight of her curiosity, Jane jumped to their spot on the list.

Gina and Thomas Ruth. Housewife and laboratory chemist, correspondingly. Twenty-two sunset avenue. No telephone number, but a pair of cell-phone numbers instead. No extra information under the notes section of the list. It was indistinguishable from the other entries.

Jane relaxed back in her seat, realizing she had been hunched towards her screen in concentration.

This made no sense. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, why had Ryder’s father ordered it erased? Had it truly been a mistake? Was she chasing a failed lead?

She chewed her thumbnail, eyes half closed. She was so tired. The exhaustion was nearly a physical thing, worming through her veins, depressing her shoulders.

Her thoughts turned to the surprise encounter she had only hours before. Of Watson, and his promise of police equipment and information.

The Alexander police department, for the most part, relied on paper documents. Much like any subsection of the government, they moved slowly, and upgraded even slower. Even in today’s day and age, their records were mostly undigitized, hence Jane’s request. There was no other way for her to access them, asides from obtaining the physical documents themselves. This was the reasoning behind her request towards Watson. She would need as much information as she could get to defend herself from the group.

But the library, on the other hand, did not suffer the same problems. Perhaps due to an overachieving librarian, or through a sudden burst of bureaucratic brilliance, they had scanned many of their records and uploaded them on a group of local servers, with redundant back-ups stored on a cloud server. An ideal medium for Jane’s snooping. She removed her thumb from her lips and opened her browser. She had the town library’s address bookmarked.

The library computers had been one of the first she had cracked, when she moved to Alexander. It had been almost a whim, a passing idea. A mere test of her abilities on a boring afternoon. She had never imagined it would amount to anything.

With the correct admin username and password, she was in their system. Compared to the polished exterior, the inside of the system was blocky and devoid of color, a brown square at the top welcomed an “admin123” to the homepage. Jane smiled. There it was once more, a rush. Incomparable. Nothing beat breaking in.

The pale box of the search bar blinked as her cursor hovered over it. Slowly, she typed the four letters of “Ruth” into it, and struck gold.