Faking It With The Hockey Star

Justin’s POV

Ryan lived about fifteen minutes from campus in the kind of neighborhood that made you forget universities and hockey scouts and anonymous accounts existed. Tree-lined streets. Small brick houses with well-kept front yards. A couple of kids riding bicycles around a corner without looking. It was the kind of place where people still waved at their neighbors, and the quiet felt genuine rather than tense.

I parked in the driveway and cut the engine. Harper stared out the passenger window without moving. Neither of us spoke for a moment.

"You ready?" I asked quietly.

She nodded slowly. "I don’t think I have a choice."

Ryan opened the front door before we even had a chance to knock, which told me he’d been watching for the truck. His eyes went immediately to Harper. "You okay?" he asked.

She forced a smile. "I’ve been better."

He stepped aside. "Come in."

The smell of fresh bread hit me the moment I crossed the threshold, warm and completely at odds with everything I’d been thinking about for the last hour. Ryan’s mother looked up from the kitchen doorway and her face broke into a genuine smile. "Justin!" she said.

"Mrs. Bennett." I smiled back. "It’s good to see you."

"You too, sweetheart." She wiped her hands on a dish towel. "Ryan!" she called toward the stairs. "Your friends are here!"

"Coming!" Footsteps, then Ryan appeared on the landing carrying a screwdriver and what looked like three different USB drives, which felt about right for a Saturday evening in his house. His father leaned out from the living room just long enough to say, "Good luck, son," before disappearing back inside.

Ryan laughed. "I’ll need it."

His bedroom was exactly what I’d expected and somehow exactly what Harper needed to see right now. Two monitors. A custom-built computer glowing softly on the desk with cable management so clean it looked deliberate. Shelves lined with old gaming consoles. Networking books stacked beside programming textbooks beside empty energy drink cans he hadn’t thrown away yet. It was the bedroom of someone who genuinely understood what he was doing, and right now that was the only thing that mattered.

Harper looked around for a moment before Ryan pulled the desk chair aside. "Laptop?" he said, holding out his hand.

She passed it to him carefully, He plugged in one cable. Then a second. The room went completely quiet except for the soft, rapid rhythm of his keyboard.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Harper remained standing. She hadn’t sat down since we’d arrived and I didn’t think she was planning to anytime soon. I reached for her hand. "Come here," I said.

She looked at me. Then quietly shook her head. "I’m okay."

"No," I said. "You’re not." I patted the bed beside me.

She still didn’t move for a moment. Then she let out a long, tired sigh and crossed the room. Instead of sitting beside me she curled onto my lap and rested her head against my shoulder. I wrapped one arm around her waist without saying anything. She was rigid, every muscle holding itself together, but she didn’t pull away.

We waited.

Ryan finally spoke. "Huh."

My head lifted immediately. "What?"

He didn’t answer. He kept typing. Another window opened. Then another. He frowned at the screen. "Interesting."

Harper straightened against me. "Ryan?"

He glanced over his shoulder. "Okay. I know what happened." Neither of us breathed. He turned the monitor toward us. "This login," he pointed to a line in the access log, "wasn’t yours."

"I know," Harper said.

"It also wasn’t from this laptop." He clicked again. "It was remote access. Someone connected from outside the machine entirely."

"So someone hacked me?" she asked.

Ryan hesitated. "Maybe. What I can tell you is that the person authenticated using a valid university account." He looked at Harper’s expression. "That means they didn’t guess your password. They got in using university credentials. Someone’s credentials."

I frowned. "Someone from the university?"

"Or someone using another person’s university account," he said. "I can’t tell which from here." He zoomed into another section of the log. "What I can tell you is they were only connected for four minutes and twelve seconds."

Harper blinked. "That’s it?"

He nodded. "They knew exactly what they were looking for. They didn’t browse. They didn’t search around. They connected, opened your project, deleted one specific file, and disconnected." He paused. "That’s not a random attack. That’s targeted."

The room went silent. I looked at Harper. Her face had gone completely pale. Ryan clicked into another window. "They also left in a hurry," he said.

"What makes you say that?" I asked.

He smiled slightly, the first real expression he’d had since we arrived. "Because they forgot to clear one temporary cache." He pointed to a small log entry near the bottom of the screen. "They deleted the master file. But they never touched the rendering cache."

Harper leaned forward. "What does that mean?"

Ryan’s smile widened. "It means I think I can recover it."

Her eyes filled instantly. "You can?"

"No promises," he said immediately. "But there’s a real chance." He turned back to the keyboard. "Give me a few minutes."

None of us spoke. The only sounds in the room were the clicking of his keyboard and the soft hum of the computer’s cooling fan. Harper twisted her fingers together in her lap. I gently covered her hands with mine to make her stop. She looked up at me.

"You don’t have to be scared," I said.

"I am," she replied.

"I know."

"What if it’s gone?" she whispered.

"It won’t be," I said.

"You don’t know that."

"No." I smiled softly. "But I know you. If this doesn’t work, you’ll find another way. You always do."

She leaned back against my shoulder. "I don’t want another way," she said quietly. "I want my interview back."

"I know," I said. "So does Ryan."

Then Ryan snapped his fingers. "Got it."

We both looked up at the same moment. He was grinning, leaning back from the monitor with his arms crossed. Very slowly, a file appeared on the screen.

Coach_Reynolds_Interview_Final.mov

Harper made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. Something between a gasp and a sob. Ryan was already moving, copying the file onto an external drive before either of us could say anything. "First rule," he said, holding up one finger. "Never trust one copy." He duplicated it. "And again," he said, making a third. Then he looked at Harper directly. "I want you to buy two external hard drives. Keep one with you at all times. Leave the other somewhere safe that isn’t your room or your bag."

She nodded quickly. "I will."

"And," he pointed at the university laptop sitting beside him, "I wouldn’t keep editing on this machine anymore."

Harper frowned. "What?"

"If someone got in once, I’m not betting they won’t try again now that they know you’re investigating." He closed the laptop deliberately. "Move everything to a personal machine. One that only you control and that has never been connected to the university network."

I looked at him. "What would you recommend?"

Ryan grabbed a notebook from his desk and started writing without hesitation. Processor. RAM. Graphics card. Storage. Within two minutes he handed me a full page of specifications. "If you’re editing documentary-level footage," he said, "that’s what you need."

I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. "Thank you."

He shrugged. "You would’ve done the same."

"I owe you one," I said.

He laughed. "You definitely do."

..

We walked back to the truck in the cool evening air. Harper held the recovered hard drive against her chest with both hands, like something she wasn’t planning on letting go of anytime soon.

I opened the passenger door for her. She climbed in. Just before I closed it, I looked at the university laptop sitting on the seat between us. Then at Harper. Then at the folded paper in my pocket with Ryan’s specifications on it.

A decision had already made itself somewhere between the bedroom and the driveway. I just hadn’t said it out loud yet.

"You’re not using that laptop anymore," I said.

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

I looked at her for a moment. Then at the paper. Then back at her. She was going to argue. I already knew that. She was going to say it was too much, that she could manage, that she didn’t need me to fix it.

She was wrong.

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