Page 60 of The Five Year Lie

“Roll up those pants and stick your feet in,” I say. “Or else you’ll melt.”

He sets the backpack down and gets busy removing his work shoes and his socks. Then he rolls up his khakis all the way to the knee, exposing pale legs and feet that have possibly never seen daylight before.

Zain steps into the water with the caution of someone who’s worried about alligators. Then he finally seats himself beside me. “All right. I can see why you chose this spot. Look at him.”

We both glance at Buzz, who’s sailing his boat in a circle around the shark, his lips pursed in a whistle. The tune is “Yankee Doodle.”

“God, he looks a lot like Drew,” Zain says.

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

A beat goes by. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Yup.”

Zain huffs out a laugh. “Sorry. The resemblance is just wild.”

What’s wild is that I’ve literally never had this conversation before. “It’s the blue eyes that get me. Just like Drew’s.”

“Yeah,” Zain says in a hushed voice. “He’s still Drew in my head. He didn’t look like a Jay.”

“If Jay was even his name. I googledJay Markerin a million different ways and barely found anything. I triedJason, too, but that didn’t work any better.”

“Same,” Zain says. “Who knew there were so many Jason Markers in the world?”

It’s true. In Maine I found a dentist and an attorney, but neither was right. So I started looking at specifics:Jay Marker US Army.Jason Marker computer programmer. None of it got me anywhere.

“I found a Lowden high school football roster, but that’s all,” Zain says.

“Found that, too,” I admit. “It was the only real hit.” But the roster was just a list of names, proving that the whole conversation with Ossman wasn’t some fever dream.

Jay Marker was a wide receiver. That’s literally all I know about him now.

“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” he says confidently.

I really hate thewein that sentence. “Zain—you need to tread carefully. You can’t tellanyonethat Drew was an impostor without affecting me and Buzz. If you start asking a lot of questions...”

“Hey, I’m careful. I won’t mention him at all. But today I asked your uncle about LiveMatch.”

“What?” I gasp as my blood pressure spikes. “Why did you do that without asking me first?”

“Hey, it wasn’t a big deal. All I said was that I’d found a reference to it in some decommissioned code. That’s not a stretch. And it’s literally my job to know how all of our platforms mesh. That’s what security engineers do.”

It takes me a moment of stunned silence to absorb this betrayal. “But you don’t even know that LiveMatch is important.”

“Actually, I do.” He kicks the surface of the water with one pale foot. “Up until now I’d been tracking Drew around the network on those tapes we stole. But last night I stopped looking for Drew and just started looking for LiveMatch. And I found some things.”

“What things?”

“Weird things. We were sending video feeds to an external server in another country. That’s bad engineering. There must have been a reason.”

I take a deep breath and try to stay calm. “Who did it?”

Zain looks suddenly grumpy. “I can’t tell. A log-in I’d never seen before, with full admin privileges. Hey—that woman is staring at us.”

I glance up and spot Maddy and two other preschool moms sitting on the opposite side of the pool together. “Ignore them.They’re just looking for gossip.” My tone is pure ice. “What did Raysaywhen you asked him?”

He doesn’t even seem to register my irritation. “Not much? I asked why we’d run video to foreign servers, and he said it was a pet project of your father’s, and he didn’t know much about it.Just some beta test for cheaper video compression.Edward was always looking for ways to save money.Those were his exact words.”