Elizabeth met me at Fire and Ice, a Pan-Asian place a few blocks from the Tower. Once our order was in, I opened Adele’s laptop and connected to the local wifi.
“This is the app.” I double-clicked the icon, then turned the computer to face her.
“SQL Server.” She navigated the interface, then opened a text window and typed in a line of code. A bunch of data scrolled down the output window. “Can you show me the alert message you received?”
I sucked in a breath. “Um…” I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to share the message, but too late now.
She lifted an eyebrow at my awkwardness.
“Would you mind, um, keeping what you see under wraps?”
“Nothing illegal, I hope,” she said.
My cheeks glowed so hot I had to lift my palms to cover them. “No, but… Well, it involves personal information about your uncle. So, I’d rather you didn’t mention it. To him.”
Elizabeth studied my face. “As long as it won’t hurt or embarrass him, I guess I’m okay with that.”
I nodded. “Adele received this warning.” I switched to Outlook and showed her the message.
“Uh-huh.” She sounded so intrigued, and I felt obligated to explain.
“Employees create profiles for themselves as part of their training. And once they’re done, the profiles get deleted. Except… apparently, they don’t because mine appeared in this warning.” I scrubbed my cheeks with my palms as if I could rub off my embarrassment. “Ugh, I can’t believe I’m showing you this. You’re his niece.”
She shrugged.
I shook my head. “Anyway, I’ve searched the Addie application, but can’t find my profile, anywhere. And when I ran a search for matches on Peter’s, mine didn’t come up there either.”
I looked at her, eyes pleading. “I need to know if there’s a fault in the system.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Let me see.” She pulled the laptop closer and went to work.
Our food arrived, but she kept typing, her rapid keystrokes interrupted by only an occasional, “Hm.”
“Please, go ahead and eat,” she said. “I think I’m close to figuring this out.”
I dug into my sesame-seaweed salad while she continued to work.
“Okay.” She swiveled the laptop, and we both looked at the screen. “This is the stored procedure that triggers the alert.” She pointed. “And this is the code it runs. See this section here? That list of names?”
I looked at the chunk of text. “Those are names of employees. Why are some a different color?”
Elizabeth scanned the list. “Cynthia, Jason and Miles have been commented out. That means, when this section runs, their profiles won’t be picked up. Their names were included in the code in the past, but not now,” she added.
“However, the other five names — yours included — become search variables, and when this piece of code runs, it switches the status flag on your profiles to active.” She scrolled further down the page. “And see here? This section deactivates those profiles once the main part of the stored procedure has run.”
She grinned like she loved doing this kind of detective work. “Now, what the main part of this stored procedure does is check each of the reactivated employee profiles against all the other profiles in the system to check for a match. If it finds one, it captures the data and sends the output in an email alert like the one you showed me.”
I pinched my brow. “But why? And where are these profiles stored? I thought they were deleted.”
Elizabeth nodded knowingly. “The data was written to an archive table. So, while it can’t be queried from the frontend application, the data still exists inside the database.”
“Huh,” I said. The big question was, why?
Adele must have been worried about one of us being matched inadvertently to a client. And it made sense that Miles, Cynthia and Jason weren’t a concern and had been removed from the code because they were all happily married.
My grandmother must have figured they were no longer at risk of falling prey to the insane attraction I’d been feeling with Peter.
This was an early warning system, so that Adele could guard against the risk of inappropriate behavior between employee and client.
Who would have thought my grandmother would be so devious?
But it illustrated just how vital her golden rule was to her. An employee must never, ever get into a personal relationship with a client because the integrity of Adelaide depended upon it.
“A ninety-six percent match between you and Peter,” Elizabeth murmured.
I blinked and realized how quickly this could get messy. “Adele set this up to protect our clients.”
Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow. “So, you’re not going to act on this?”
“On what?” I asked calmly.
“On Peter. I mean, it sounds like you guys are practically a perfect match.”
I shook my head vehemently. “It’s against company policy, and this is confidential. Elizabeth, you can’t tell Peter. I already have several candidates for him to—”
“How’d they score? I mean, compared to you?”
I huffed. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not in the running.”
She tilted her head, nodding like she only half agreed, and picked up her fork.
When she’d finished her first mouthful of Szechuan tempeh, she said, “I won’t say anything to him, but I think you should.”
“I can’t. Adele would kill me. She’d never make an exception because this policy is her most important rule. She’d lose credibility in the eyes of our employees.”
Elizabeth sighed. “It’s none of my business, but please consider that you might be throwing away Peter’s future happiness, not just your own.”
“I’ll find him the right person, I promise.” But that was the last promise I wanted to keep.