when they would engage in displays of affection in public, groaning that he preferred PDAs to be of the computer variety. Sasha had found them incredibly sweet, people to be admired, not embarrassed by. And Ryan had seemed bewildered when she’d pointed that out to him.
“How are your folks?” she asked now. “This must be awful on them.”
“They’re pulling together, as always.” There was, Sasha noted, none of the usual embarrassment in his voice now.
“My mom keeps thinking it must be something she’s done, my dad keeps telling her she’s the perfect mother and it has nothing to do with her.”
“Chances are he’s right, it has nothing to do with her, or them. In a stable family like yours, it’s often simply…being a teenager. Thinking you know everything. Rebellion against the status quo, all that.”
It wasn’t lost on her that these were some of the reasons Ryan had gotten himself into trouble all those years ago. He’d never denied to her that he’d started down the path that had led him into big trouble early on. He’d hacked his first system when he was sixteen, a simple one, that of his high school in an effort to improve his grades. It had been so easy he’d graduated quickly to other hacks.
He’d never gone for banks or financial institutions. Money wasn’t his motivation. Once he’d taken on a gaming company, in an effort to get an advance look at a new game they were developing. Their security had been much tighter than the school’s, and it had taken him a long time.
Redstone he had tackled when he was twenty-one, simply for the challenge. He’d read an article on the brand-new Redstone genius Ian Gamble, who had developed a state-of-the-art firewall that had the computer security industry buzzing. It had taken him nearly a year to find a way past Gamble’s ingenious design.
And if Ian hadn’t been willing to take him on at Josh’s request, Ryan didn’t know where he’d be.
“They don’t have any idea where she might have gone?”
“They’ve thought and thought about it, and can’t come up with anything.” He seemed to hesitate, then said quietly, “I’m worried about them.”
“They’ll probably be fine once we find her.”
“I appreciate the confidence,” he said. “And I know if anybody can find her, you can. But they seem full of…selfdoubt. And part of that’s my fault.”
“Why?” she asked, startled at the sudden turn.
“First I go get into trouble, and now Trish essentially runs away from home? They thought they were doing a good job with us, but now they’re questioning everything they’ve ever done.”
Sasha had only met his parents twice, once by accident when they’d dropped by Ryan’s apartment when she was there, and once after the breakup, when she’d gone by Redstone to return a CD he’d lent her and they’d been visiting. She’d liked them both times. Enough to wish things had gone differently. They seemed to her the epitome of the backbone of America, the kind of people who really made things work, the kind she admired and respected.
She didn’t like the thought of them second-guessing their entire lives.
“I’ll talk to them. Maybe I can help them see that’s not true.”
He seemed relieved at that idea. So he did care, she thought.
“Will they be home tonight?”
He nodded. “Dad gets home about six, and mom’s always home in the afternoons.”
“Is she still working for that doctor?”
“Yeah. And Dad’s still crunching numbers at the bank.”
She remembered suddenly how he’d once told her his dad had to be the most boring guy on the planet. Same boring work, at the same boring place, for over twenty years. That had been, she realized in retrospect, the beginning of the end. The dismissive assessment had angered her. She couldn’t be with someone who didn’t realize the value of that, who didn’t make the connection between that kind of steadiness and his own comfortable, carefree life.
And she’d told him so, in no uncertain terms.
“Almost as boring as sitting at a computer all day,” she said, not bothering to keep the snap out of her voice. And then wondering why; it wasn’t like it mattered anymore.
“Computers aren’t boring!” His defensiveness was quick, instinctive. “They’ve changed the world, made amazing things possible.” He gestured at the GPS screen set into the dash of her car. “You’d be fumbling with maps if you didn’t have that thing to give you turn-by-turns right to Safe Haven’s front door.”
“True enough,” she had to admit.
“They’re not boring at all.”
As they pulled to a stop at a red light, she turned slightly to look at him.
“Did you ever think that maybe numbers aren’t boring to your father? That maybe he likes the…the logic of them, the symmetry, the balance? Did you ever think that your blessed computers are based on numbers, and that you probably inherited some of your father’s knack with them, and that that’s the reason you’re good with them?”
She could see by his expression that he hadn’t.
The light changed. As she turned her attention back to driving, she was inwardly chiding herself for coming down so hard. This was, after all, none of her business anymore. It probably never had been. But it had been a measure of how much she liked the guy that she’d even tried to change his attitude about some things that were very basic to her.
Teach you to be a foolish female, try to change a male who doesn’t want to change, she thought, and not for the first time.
“Sorry,” she said into the silence of the car, “you came to me for help, not criticism.”
She heard him let out a compressed breath before he said levelly, “If one’s the price for the other, I’ll take it.”
Now that was a change, she thought, surprised anew.
“Besides,” he went on, “I realize now how you could spend twenty years in the same place. I never want to leave Redstone. I still don’t get the accounting thing, but what you said about the numbers…that makes sense.”
My God, Sasha thought. He really has changed.
The old Ryan would have either laughed her off, or gotten even more defensive.
Had he finally grown up? Had the boy who had wanted only to slide along smoothly, the only challenges he enjoyed coming from his beloved computers, finally realized that people were what really mattered?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t be sure, at least, not yet. Maybe he was just putting on a front of connecting with real people, knowing—because she’d told him so bluntly—that she thought him lacking that skill.
And there you go again, making it all about you. When did you get so stuck on yourself?
She
