Dwight was alone again in his office once Hathaway offered to escort the TV people out of their maze of a building.
He could tell from the look Hathaway gave him as he walked out that he wasn’t pleased with the producer’s questions about REACH, but at least they hadn’t wandered into thorny territory. The notion that Susan had anything to do with the technology was completely off base.
Still, he wished he could rewind the clock and start the morning over again. He planned to bring up the subject of Laurie’s late husband as a way to make his contact with her more personal. But the overture had gone over like a ton of bricks. When Dwight and Hathaway first started meeting with venture capitalists, Hathaway had told him, You’re just so blunt! I’m talking blunt like a ten-pound mallet. That’s fine when you’re talking to me, but when it comes to money, you’ve got to learn some nuance.
Their relationship was blunt by design. Dwight’s mind wandered to that Friday night of his sophomore year when Hathaway had stumbled upon him in the lab, catching Dwight hacking into the registrar’s office’s database. Though he wasn’t cheating or changing grades, Dwight wanted to prove to himself that he could slip through the virtual walls of his own university. It was illegal, and a violation of the school’s code of conduct, plus Dwight had been stupid enough to do it on the computer lab’s equipment, which the university often monitored. Hathaway said he believed that Dwight had no ill motives and would defend him to the university, but he felt obligated to notify the administration to protect his own lab.
Dwight was so upset about disappointing his mentor that he came to the lab late the following night, intending to clean out his workstation and leave a letter of resignation. Instead of finding the lab empty, Dwight found a female student he recognized from the Intro to Computer Science class for which he was a teaching assistant. She was leaving Hathaway’s office. Dwight couldn’t help but think of the campus whispers about the most “crush-worthy” teacher.
He might have slipped out of the lab, resigning as intended, if the soles of his tennis shoes hadn’t squeaked against the tile floors. Hathaway emerged from his office and explained that he saw no reason to report Dwight’s hacking to the university after all. The administration would only blow the activities out of proportion, failing to understand the natural curiosity of someone with Dwight’s blossoming talents. He forced Dwight to promise, however, that he would channel those skills into legitimate work—the kind that could earn a young man a fortune in Silicon Valley.
That conversation eventually gave rise to a strange kind of friendship. The student-teacher, mentor-mentee relationship became more peer-to-peer, marked by utter mutual honesty. Hathaway was the first adult to ever treat Dwight like a real person, not like a broken child who needed to be fixed or isolated. In return, Dwight accepted Hathaway, even if he was a little shady. How else would REACH have ever started if he and Hathaway had not trusted each other completely?
If only Dwight had Hathaway’s knack for schmoozing. Maybe he could have mentioned Laurie’s husband without sticking his foot in his mouth. He hoped he hadn’t offended her so much that she would cut him from the production.
Once everyone was gathered in Los Angeles, all he’d need was a few seconds of access to each person’s cell phone, and all their texts, e-mails, and phone calls would be downloaded automatically to Dwight’s computer. The problem was, he didn’t know whether they’d all show up for filming at once or if their appointments would be back-to-back.
Thinking about the Los Angeles shoot gave him an idea. He pulled up the last e-mail he had received from Jerry, the assistant producer who Laurie mentioned was scouting locations near campus. He opened a new message and began to type.
After hitting the SEND key, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the photograph next to his computer. Hathaway had snapped it three years ago on a dive trip during REACH’s annual corporate retreat to Anguilla. The company had flown every single employee—down to the student interns—for a four-day stay at the luxurious Viceroy. Everyone had gushed over the sprawling resort property and the pillow-soft white sand of Meads Bay, but for Dwight, those trips were always about traveling beneath the water. The picture on his desk was from a wall dive at the keys of Dog Island with a sheer one-hundred-foot drop. He swam with tuna, turtles, yellowtail snapper, even a reef shark and two southern stingrays. Deep in the sea is where his thoughts found calm.
He stared into the water in the photograph, wishing he could jump through the frame. He needed calm right now. This television show had him feeling all the pain of losing Susan again. And when he wasn’t reliving the pain, he was wired with anticipation about the possibility of finally learning who had killed the only woman he had ever loved.