Page 2 of Last Seen

Chapter One

Halley

Washington, DC

“You’re fired.”

Halley James crosses M Street on her way home from her office in Foggy Bottom, heart pounding. She is in shock. Two words, and her entire world has blown apart.

It is midmorning on a sunny Monday, and the streets are calm.

Everyone is already at work, or at school, or in the shops.

The lunch rush hasn’t started. The few cars behave, not beeping and cursing and rushing.

She is alone, marching up the hill, the two words from her boss’s mouth replaying with every step.

You’re fired you’re fired you’re fired.

She’d taken special care with her appearance today. Her good-luck suit, her dark, unruly hair wound into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Her mother’s pearls.

A fresh start. A well-earned, long-overdue promotion. And instead, a dead end.

She’s not crying, not yet. No doubt the tears are lodged inside, still trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

She isn’t much of a crier anyway; she is a scientist, too cool and logical to waste time with tears.

But she can feel them threatening. They come when she is frustrated, and today qualifies.

She stops at the light on Wisconsin Avenue. Her hands are shaking.

The left looks so strange without her wedding rings.

She took them off before her shower this morning and didn’t put them back on.

The sorrow of that nearly overwhelmed her.

But she knows she needs to get accustomed to not seeing the flash of diamonds and platinum, losing the acceptance of others when they immediately know her status as a married woman.

Of course, she’s spent years as a married woman, and nothing else.

A decade of waiting, of trying to be a good wife, of trying to take the next logical step with a man who she found out too late does not want what she does from their life together.

Ten years down the drain. All that’s left is two signatures on a long piece of blue-backed paper to officially separate her from him, to divest their lives. So ironic; the very day she was supposed to be starting over, launching her new life as a single woman, this happens.

She hasn’t decided when she’s going to tell everyone.

Well, she’ll have to share her new address with Human Resources, obviously, so they can update her file for the official termination package.

But her dad, her friends, Theo’s family .

.. She made this decision to walk away from her marriage, and telling people they’ve decided to go their separate ways makes it seem too real.

And now, the double whammy. Can she go through the formalities of ending things with Theo if she doesn’t have a job?

She doesn’t have a job .

She’s still trying to wrap her head around the one-eighty that just happened.

Today was meant to be celebratory. Moving up to lab director was a decade-long ambition.

Everyone knew she was about to get the gig.

Her boss had been hinting at the bump up for weeks.

She’d been counting on the extra money to get her through the separation and divorce.

She scored the furnished basement apartment of her friends’ town house in Georgetown and was going to propose a short-term lease so she could have a safe place to live while she gets on her feet.

It’s dark, and it’s small, but it is well appointed and, more importantly, missing her husband.

She officially left three weeks ago, leaving him with the house in McLean, their dog, Charlie, the art they’ve collected on various vacations, and the extra room she’s been trying to convince him for the past five years would be a great nursery.

She needs this money to house herself, feed herself, start over.

And now ... a terrifying reversal of fortune.

The light turns green. Yellow. Red again. She is frozen on this corner, unable to move forward, and finding it impossible to go backward.

She ducks into the coffee shop to her left instead. Sits at a blond oak table. Retraces the morning, the week, the month, looking for a word, a sign, that she was about to be blindsided. She can find nothing.

This morning, high on the knowledge she was about to get the promotion she’d been expecting, she’d taken off her rings, determined to become this new person, to open this new chapter.

She’d entered the building, swiped her pass, and made her way to the lab, just like always.

The sameness of her days is appealing. She loves the lab. Loves her work.

Her admin, Barbara, waved at her. “Ivan is looking for you.”

Ivan Howland, her boss, the founder and CEO of their company, the National Investigative Sciences Laboratory, the NISL. Nothing unusual there.

“We have a meeting at ten. He wants me now instead? Why?”

Barbara shrugged. “I don’t know, Halley. He’s in his office.”

So she’d walked the hallway, her block-heeled pumps clacking on the marble. Knocked on his door, like she had a hundred times before. Put on a huge grin.

“Morning!”

He’d looked up—was that fear in his eyes?—and waved her in. “Close the door.”

She had. Sat in the leather-and-chrome chair across from his desk. Raised a brow. When he didn’t speak, she finally asked, “Everything okay?”

Ivan heaved a huge sigh. “Halley, there’s no good way to say this.

The investigation into the ransomware attack last month has concluded.

Though we’ve determined this was not a state-sponsored action, simply an international group out to ransom the data, the link that allowed the hackers into the system came from your computer. I’m afraid I have to let you go.”

“Excuse me?”

“The board insists. There has to be a head to roll, and you ... Well, I hate this, I really do. But it’s out of my hands. You’re fired.”

“Ivan. Surely you’re joking.”

“I wish I was. You’re being let go with cause, too, because the board feels this action was in violation of your contract, so unfortunately there will be no severance.

HR will be in touch with all the information you need so you can apply for unemployment and CObrA for your insurance.

But I’m afraid I have to take your pass, your keys to the lab, any physical notes you’ve taken on the current work, and you need to leave the premises. Now.”

Her entire life unraveling because she clicked on a link in an email?

Impossible. This wasn’t happening. Recognition dawned.

This was an excuse. It wasn’t just that phishing email, was it?

Last year, she’d reported one of the lab managers for unceasing sexual harassment.

Of her, yes, but of the younger women in the lab, too.

He’d been the son of one of the board members, thought he could get away with it, that he was untouchable.

“This is retaliation for Kirk Agrant, isn’t it.”

“Now, Halley. That’s long in the past.” She noticed he didn’t say it wasn’t.

“I built this lab with you, Ivan. You’re just going to let them throw me out on my ear because of a technicality?”

He took off his glasses and cleaned them.

When had he aged so much? He was only twenty years her senior, but today he looked haggard.

His beard was streaked with white, his hair thinning.

Maybe he was sick. He had the gray pallor of the unwell.

Of a man with a destiny curbed by ten men and women in ancillary industries who were pressuring him to take the company public.

Halley had been against that, too. Firing her cleared the paths for everyone’s goals, no doubt.

He jammed his glasses back on. “It’s a bit more than a technicality, Halley.

It cost the lab millions to ransom the data they stole and ruined the integrity of multiple cases.

We’re open to lawsuits now, and the board .

.. They need a scalp, and I’m sorry to say they decided on yours.

It was a unanimous vote. I hope you understand. I really have no choice here.”

A barista comes over. Halley doesn’t know this one; she’s all of eighteen and fresh as a thorny rose, with her septum piercing and sleeve of tattoos. “Can I get you something?”

“Oh. No. I was just ...”

“If you’re not buying something, I’m afraid you need to leave.”

“Right. Of course.”

She wanders up Wisconsin, turns left on P Street, crosses Thirty-Third.

Her friends’ town house is four stories and redbrick Federalist swank, like everything in this neighborhood.

What was this morning’s elegant freedom is now a bleak set of mossy steps to a basement.

Small. Lonely. And completely unaffordable.

She can rely on her friends’ generosity for a few more days, maybe, but then?

Every step she’s made in the past few weeks was in anticipation of getting promoted and landing a raise, not losing everything.

It hits her again, hard, and she sags against the door. She is going to have to let this dream go. She has to swallow her pride, move back home with Theo, and try to start again.

She collapses on the sofa. She can’t keep on like this anymore.

She is being tested. Normally, if there is anything she loves in this life, it’s tests.

She was always the weird kid who couldn’t wait to sit for an exam.

It didn’t matter if it was a pop quiz in biology or the SATs or the last final for her graduate degree in forensic science or, now, as an adult, the annual boards she takes to keep her license active.

Her heart races in anticipation; she sharpens her pencils; the paper appears on her desk—now the link to the test file on the computer—and off she goes.

If there are real superpowers, test taking is hers.

This one? She’s failing miserably.

She enters the apartment, drops her bag on the floor, sinks onto the sofa, head in her hands. She yanks out the clip, and the dark mass flows over her shoulders.

Okay. Think.