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“We can get you a new identity if you really want it?” Her grandfather looked at her grandmother. She’d brought it up before in passing. “We’ve talked to a few lawyers. Changing your name will help you move forward and you can start a fresh life here.”
She nodded her head yes. She wasn’t Alexa Violet Carmichael anymore. Today had to be the last day.
“I want to be Vivian Getman,” she said.
Her grandmother had always told her she looked exactly like her great-grandmother, Vivian, and she’d loved the name. Why not? Getman was her grandmother’s maiden name. It was a change but not something pulled out of the sky for her to try to remember either.
“Then that is who you’ll be,” her grandmother said, standing up and pulling her in for a hug. “And we’ll start calling you by that now. It’s a new life starting today, Vivian. Make the most of it.”
1
Stood Still
Thirteen years later
Brent Elliot heardthe knock at the door but didn’t bother to get up and answer it.
He was working and no one should be bothering him at his house.
He’d moved here seven months ago from White Plains and didn’t care if it was the slowest pace of life he’d ever been in.
In his eyes, life had all but stood still in everything but his career.
The career that allowed him to work from home. No one knew what he did exactly and it had to stay that way.
The monitors were processing data on each side of him, the one in the middle, he was typing code in and trying to figure out what was going on from what had landed on his desk this morning.
“Brent,” he heard yelled and dropped his head down. Shit, it was his mother.
He closed the screen in the middle and put up more data processing. She’d have no clue what it said anyway. His father, on the other hand, as a software engineer, he’d be able to figure some of it out and since Brent’s cover as a data analyst for the FBI was his job on paper, it was all good.
He let out a sigh and turned to look at his mother in the doorway to his office at the back of the house. He should have never given her a key.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you work?”
“You know I do, but I took the day off. I haven’t talked to you in weeks. Seen you in months. Your father and I are worried.”
He pushed away from his desk and decided to make his way to the kitchen. He was going to need coffee for this visit.
“There is nothing to be worried about. I’m working. You know my job keeps me busy. The government never sleeps.”
“What do you look at all day long?” his mother asked, then sat at his counter. Yep, she was getting comfortable.
He pulled out two cups for coffee, noticed that it was almost three and he hadn’t had lunch yet.
“Just like you study numbers, I study data,” he said, smirking at her.
He had the same response he always did. His mother was a CPA. “It’s all code.”
“It is. Code finds the data. Then I analyze the data and send it onto the right channels.”
He did that. It wasn’t a lie. But he had programs set up to do all the work. He got flags, he stopped his other work that no one knew he did, researched those alerts and passed them on. It might take ten hours of his time a week, but it kept him honest when people asked about his job.
He hated to lie and didn’t want to get caught up in anything. This way, he never was. He only omitted the other hours of work he did assigned to a special projects unit that very few knew existed.
“Boring,” his mother said and accepted the coffee.
“So you came here to criticize my work again,” he said.
