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“It’s a date. Talk to you soon.” I felt better as I disconnected. It sucked, not talking to my friends.
My concerns from the flight were back. If this was how badly friendships could deteriorate after one argument with Chase, what would happen if we hooked up again and our relationship went even further south? I couldn’t handle that.
I headed back upstairs, and the guys and I rotated through the shower, getting ready for our days. The one thing I wouldn’t miss about this trip was sharing a bathroom.
My goal for the day was to find out how much additional damage Mike had done. I had a strong suspicion he was behind a few of the delays we had with programming, but if I could prove it, it would also give us a direction to go toward fixing things more quickly
I settled in to work next to Luke, in the conference room. It was bittersweet, swapping conversation and jokes with him like we’d always done, but knowing that more was possible if I was willing to risk it. I didn’t know if I was.
Based on what we found yesterday, I asked Zane to have his team compare all the timestamps from when files were modified from this building, versus when people were in it. He had a list to me by midmorning, and I started working my way through it.
New problem—for every file change on the list, the history that came before it had been deleted. There was no way to roll back or recover anything that was changed.
Fuck.I sank back in my chair, pulling my attention from my screen, and blinked to clear up my dry eyes. When I looked again, Luke was watching me.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Enjoying the view. How about you? You’re stumped on something.”
“Yes.”
He tugged my hand from where it rested near my laptop, and brushed his lips over my fingertips. “Magic kissing mojo?”
I started to laugh, but revelation stopped me short. “God, you’re incredible.”
“I know. What’s up?”
I actually had the answer. “Get me access to the deleted change logs.”
“If I had that power, I’d do it in the heartbeat. But auditors only. You know the rules.”
“Oh.” I slumped again. The rule made sense, specifically in instances like this. If someone could erase things and then erase the proof they’d done it, we’d be fucked.
Except, what good did any of that do, if I couldn’t restore things?
“I can get you screenshots or an export of the logs,” Luke said. “Just not access to the software itself.”
And if there was something to fix, we could go through the right channels to restore it. “I’ll take that. Duh.”
“Sorry. Wasn’t thinking. I was distracted.” Luke winked. “One extract from Internal Audits coming up.”
By early afternoon, I had a list of everything that had been changed—presumably all by Mike, based on a ranting email he’d sent us this morning—down to the single quote. What Mike had done was randomly tweak modules after they passed final QA. Over and over, across different nodes and projects. More than half the time, it was a female developer’s work—a neat feat, considering he only had four working for him.
The cheers from both Team Percival and Gawain, when I told them how much time we’d just saved, probably could have been heard without a conference line.
“You’re brilliant,” Luke told me when we finished the update call.
I flushed under the compliment. “I didn’t do it all myself. Magical kissing mojo, and all that.”
“No, this is all on you. Fantastic job.”
Months’ worth of stress faded away, as I started to work through my own list.
Now, if only my personal life could be as simple as restoring a few corrupted files from the past and overwriting the mistakes that came after.
Except, had hooking up with Luke and Chase been a mistake? Any of it? That little voice said it was, but I didn’t feel like that was the case.
