Page 16

Leonard

“ I swear I want to throw this computer out the window!” Roxanne hisses, standing up and pacing around the room.

She is furious. We have reached another dead end. We’re running in circles, and I can understand her frustration. We’re both used to getting what we want quickly, and this makes us both restless.

For once, I have no words for her. I’m equally disappointed in our results. And I can’t blame it on our lack of commitment because we have been here in my office for many days and nights, trying to find out how they got in.

“How is it even possible? We follow the money, the digital traces they could have left, nothing. How is it possible that we can’t come up with anything useful? Who are they? Why are they better than us?” she almost shouts. She is so agitated I don’t even know if she’s breathing.

Those are all valid questions, and I’m disappointed that I don’t have any answers for her.

I don’t know if she is angrier at not being able to finish this job or because she thinks there is someone better than her out there.

I know a thing or two about pride, and she seems to value her skills to the point of honing them to perfection.

Apparently, someone is more perfect than her.

It’s similar to the feeling I had when I had to ask for her help. What if she proves that she is better than me? It’s a low blow to recover from.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for any of that,” I reluctantly admit.

She turns around and stares at me. I don’t know if she is pissed with my lack of help or just pissed in general. Difficult to say when she is so angry.

“What are we getting wrong?” she asks.

“We are doing nothing wrong. That’s the problem. We’ve tried different approaches to the same problem. We checked, double-checked and we compared notes. If one of us made a mistake, the other should have noticed, but nothing.”

She scoffs, disappointed, starting again to pace my office.

“Well, there must be something we’re missing, or we would have found a solution by now, don’t you think?” Disappointment drips from every single word like acid, corroding her happiness and her ability to think straight.

She’s gone down this rabbit hole we are working on, and she can’t get out. She won’t find anything useful until she can clear her head.

“We have to take a step back and try to see things with a fresh perspective,” I suggest.

She scoffs again. “How many times have we already done that?”

“And we’ll keep doing it until we find something. Staying on the same path won’t help us find anything useful,” I insist, and she rolls her eyes.

She won’t listen to me. She is so focused on her rage that she can’t think of anything else.

I stand up and get her attention. When I walk toward the door, she starts panicking.

“Where are you going? We haven’t finished here,” she complains, following me to the elevator.

“We’re going to a place that can help us focus on work again. I don’t know about you, but I’m completely spent, and I’m not able to think about anything at all,” I explain.

“And you have a magic place to do that?” There is amusement in her voice.

At least I distracted her from her bad mood.

“Sort of.”

When we reach the garage, she is smiling, and when I approach the old Porsche, she has a grin on her face.

“So, you can drive after all,” she taunts me.

I open the door for her and walk around the car to get in.

“It’s midnight; I can’t keep my driver on stand-by all day. He has a family,” I explain.

“He does?” She fakes surprise. “I thought he was a robot. Does he smile sometimes?”

I chuckle. I have the same question too, but apparently, he has a wife and kids, and he is pretty damn smiley with them.

We drive in silence in the less chaotic traffic of the night until we reach our destination.

“What is this place?” she asks, peeking up at the anonymous warehouse in the commercial area.

“Jesus, it’s a surprise. Can you wait literally one minute until we’re inside?” I chuckle as she rolls her eyes.

I grab the keys from my pocket and walk to the side of the building. The door opens with a squeaky noise, and when we step inside it’s completely dark. The smell of dust and spray paint is particularly strong, but Roxanne doesn’t complain.

I grab her hand and drag her with me until I find the light switch on the wall where I know it is.

“You must come here often if you know where to find the lights,” she observes, and I nod.

“The owner is a friend, and he gave me a key to come here after hours,” I explain while I guide her to another door.

“Why?” she asks.

I answer, opening the door. “It’s a rage room. If people knew I came here to smash things, they’d think I’ve lost my mind, and my company stocks would drop.”

She looks at me with pity in her eyes. “With all the money you got, you’re not even free to live. Is it really worth it?”

Her words are a punch to the gut. Not because she said them in an offensive way but because they are true. Sometimes I want to disappear and live a normal life, but even that is impossible because everybody knows my face.

I don’t answer, and fortunately, she doesn’t push the subject. “We need to put these on before we start smashing things.” I hand her coveralls, a helmet, and glasses.

“You willingly put these on over your tailored suit?” She chuckles.

“I know it sounds blasphemous, but yes. I do.” I remove my jacket and put it on a chair in the hallway.

She starts to dress in the clothes I got for her and they are clearly not her size. They are huge on her, and I lower to roll her pant legs just above her ankles.

When I look up at her, I find her wide-eyed. “What?” I frown.

“You just dropped on your knees to help me.”

“Yeah, so?” What did I do wrong?

“How do you even know how to do that? Don’t you have someone doing that for you every morning?” she asks.

“What? Dressing me? I’m capable of putting on my clothes without assistance,” I answer, a bit pissed over this ridiculous idea she has of me. Like I have someone to take care of even the most stupid tasks just because I have money. For Pete’s sake, I’m an independent adult.

She grins. “I’m joking, but it’s funny to see the outrage on your face.”

“Brat,” I murmur, standing up, and she sticks out her tongue.

I turn around to hide my smile and start putting on my clothes. When I face her again, she starts to laugh like I’ve never seen her do before. She is even more beautiful when she laughs, and I almost feel the urge to make her laugh more. The mere idea is terrifying.

We finally face the room full of plates, an old computer, an even older TV, crates of all sizes, and other unidentified objects that have already been violently affected by the baseball bats we hold.

“So, what are we doing? Smashing things?” she asks.

She doesn’t seem eager to break what is inside this room.

I get it. The first time I came here, I spent the whole time feeling guilty about destroying perfectly intact objects.

When you grow up paying attention to care for the things your parents give you, there is something unholy in taking out your rage in this way.

But when you go home after doing it, you feel so relieved you can’t wait to come back a second time and a third after that.

I approach the old TV and smash the front glass in one go.

“Okay. That’s an answer.” She chuckles, and I watch her choose what to start with first.

She hesitantly hits the computer.

“Come on. Put some of the anger you had in my office into this crap,” I egg her on, and instantly see her mood change.

She grabs her bat with both hands and swings at a pile of plates stacked on a crate. The white porcelain flies all over the wall at the back of the room, breaking into dozens of pieces. A satisfied smile appears on her face.

She focuses her anger on a wooden crate used to carry fruits and vegetables. It takes more swings to smash it, but when she does, she looks at me panting and grinning like crazy.

“Well, I have to admit this is fun,” she says.

I nod. “It’s somehow therapeutic.”

I hit the bat over the TV again, smashing the back part. It’s one of those old pieces with a cathode ray tube that they removed for safety reasons. I hit the external shell until it’s hanging on one side. My arms burn from the effort, but I’m smiling like I always do in this room.

All the stress, anger, and frustration fly away with every swing I take. It doesn’t matter if I’m sweating in my thousand-dollar suit. The energy burning inside me is taking away all the bad thoughts, problems, and worries I carry on my shoulders every day.

I turn toward Roxanne, and I watch her laughing like crazy while she hits the computer again and again.

She is beautiful and carefree. I envy her pink hair and printed T-shirt, her idealist heart and her noble purposes.

There is something still pure in her, untouched by the ugliness of this industry, something I have learned to admire since I started working with her.

I watch her laugh and witness the switch in her mood.

Her smiles fade as if an undesired thought has snuck into her mind.

In the beginning, she is startled, almost physically unbalanced by the sudden image appearing in her head.

Then the rage takes over, and the anger distorting her beautiful smile is something that tears my chest open.

The sorrow, mixed with fury, fear, and something like shame, is branded in my brain.

She hits that computer again and again; she doesn’t stop when the object is completely destroyed.

She doesn’t stop when tears stream down her face and hiccups shake her chest.

I didn’t mean for her to have such a bad experience. I wanted to help release some stress, but this is deeper and more complex than frustration. I grab her elbow, and she drops the bat. She loses her balance and falls into my arms when I pull her against my chest.

I hold her tight while her tears keep coming, and her arms envelop my waist like I’m her lifeline. She sobs uncontrollably, and I feel responsible for her meltdown. But I don’t know how to fix my mistake.

“It’s okay,” are the only words I can think of, and also the most stupid.

Nothing is okay. She is upset and crying in my arms; nothing is even close to being okay.

“You’ll be fine,” I whisper, kissing the top of her head.

This, too, is a stupid thing to say. How can I know? I don’t even know the reason for this change in her mood.

“Are you going to keep rattling off the worst rom-com clichés you know?” she asks between hiccups.

I stifle a chuckle. “I hope not.”

She rests her forehead on my chest and breathes in deeply. It takes her a few minutes to regain composures.

“Sorry about that,” she murmurs, drying her tears with the back of her hand.

I want to reach out and clean her streaked face with my thumb, but I refrain from doing such a stupid thing. Too intimate. Too close to care for her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I offer to listen to her story.

“No, but I think I owe you an explanation,” she admits.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I point out.

I don’t want her to feel compelled to confess something so private she looks ashamed about it.

“I want to give you an explanation. Even if I don’t want to talk about it. If that makes any sense,” she clarifies.

“Do you know how I started as a white hat?” she asks as I invite her to sit on one of the crates beside me.

I shake my head, not trusting my mouth to say another stupid thing.

“It was when we entered the witness protection program. I was a kid with a computer and a lot of time to spend in my room. I was terrified to go out in the beginning because I thought someone was coming to kill me, to kill my family,” she explains.

I can’t even imagine being so scared so young. She was barely a teenager when her sister testified at the trial that completely changed their lives forever.

“I missed my sister. I didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but I was scared to search for her because I didn’t want to lead someone to her if they tracked me. So I decided I wanted to do something to remove the problem. Remove the person that ruined our life,” she confesses.

She gives a quick glance in my direction, probably to gauge my reaction. I hold her gaze for a second before speaking.

“Did you want to kill him?” I ask. There is no judgment in my voice. I’m only curious to know what went through the head of a scared fourteen-year-old.

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t think that far ahead. I wanted to find information about him and understand if there was something I could do to free my sister and my family.”

I believe her. Sometimes you want to know more to put your heart to rest. I guess her parents tried to protect her young mind from all the brutal information about the trial, but doing so fed her fear.

She wasn’t a toddler unable to understand; she was a teenager with a vivid imagination.

And considering the adult she is now, she was a smart one.

“So I tried to hack the FBI.” A small smile curves her lips.

I chuckle. “Of course you did.”

“I didn’t succeed, but from that day on, I dedicated my whole life to this, to find a way to reunite my family. When this nightmare disappeared years ago, I felt empty. I don’t have a purpose in my life anymore and I feel lost. And I feel angry because I should be happy, but I feel just…lost.”

I study her face, her big eyes full of shame and somehow regret. I always thought she was a spoiled brat, but the truth is that behind that pink hair and cocky attitude, there is a woman scared about her future and scared of what she became.

“You can do for others what you did for your sister,” I suggest.

She frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Use your skills to help people. You have no idea how many injustices there are in this world. Bad things happen to good people, and justice often isn’t served.

Help those people. Use your skills to find a way to give those victims the life they deserve, a life without fear. Help those people to heal.”

“You’re suggesting I do something illegal?” She smiles.

“I’m suggesting you find irrefutable proof to put the perpetrators behind bars.”

She nods and lowers her gaze to the concrete floor. Her brows are furrowed as if thinking about it. I hope she will consider it.

“Thank you for listening. It’s difficult to find someone to tell these things to. Not even my sister or Raphael know,” she confesses.

I study her and understand her reluctance to say something like that to the person who involuntarily caused all this.

“I’m glad to help.”

But the truth is that I feel powerless in the face of her struggle. I can give her money and a company, but I will never be able to give her what she really needs: the answer to a future she can’t see in front of her—the most terrifying thing of all.