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“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Okay. So talk.”
“Can we do it inside?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Your neighbor has been staring at me since I pulled up.”
I saw Mr. Jackson fiddling with his rosebushes by the driveway, very clearly trying to eavesdrop. I also saw the sleek black Tesla sedan on the street.
I pulled him inside and closed the door. “Okay, what do you want?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“I, uh, want to talk to you.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You said that already. Get to the point,Mr. Cauthon.”
I emphasized his name formally to make a point, but despite my attitude, I still felt a surge of hope. I was downrighthappyto see him. The brief moment when I pulled him inside, when he was all up in my personal space, made me tingle with excitement. His scent unleashed a flood of memories from last night.
Once again, I shoved the feelings down. It felt like my body was betraying me. This man wasn’t my friend. He was partners with a total asshole, and he had allowed me to get kicked out last night.
“The interview…” he began.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I blew it. I didn’t want to work for your dumb company, anyway.”
“No,” he said slowly. “I mean, yes. You did kind of blow it. But what I wanted to discuss was your cryptocurrency experience. You lied on your resume.”
I gave a start. “No I didn’t. Everything on my resume is true. If you don’t believe the part about the point-of-sale program I wrote on the Litecoin blockchain, then I can show you my code.”
“I’m not talking about that,” he said patiently. “Yes, everything on your resume is technically true. But I’m talking about what youomitted.”
I felt my skin go cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He continued as if I hadn’t responded. “There is a significant chunk of time on your resume where nothing is listed. Not even any specific freelance projects. I did a little research after you left. Your resume listed your home address. A big condo in an expensive part of San Mateo. You purchased it five years ago.”
“So what?”
“Purchased incash,” he said. “I found that curious. Considering how low interest rates currently are, it does not make sense to purchase a home outright.”
“You sound like my sister,” I said dryly.
“The logical conclusion was that an inheritance was involved,” he said. “That led me to learn about your father. I’m sorry.”
My chest went tight and it was difficult to breathe. How did he know about that? Public obituary, probably. Or county death records. Either way, the personal violation felt as intense as a knife to the gut.
“Get out,” I whispered.
Jude shuffled on his feet awkwardly, but didn’t go anywhere. “As I said. Using an inheritance to purchase this place made the most sense. Especially given the timing. But that was not the case.”
“Stop,” I breathed.
“Your dad didn’t leave you anything. Too much medical debt. Your mom had to declare bankruptcy after he… was gone.”
He didn’t leave much of anything behind, I thought bitterly.Not enough photographs or personal belongings. No family history, or information about my grandparents, who had died before I was born. Dad left nothing sentimental to remember him by.
“That was kind of a dead end for my research,” he admitted. “Until I looked at the credit card records fromMarcello’s. Not exactly legal on my part, but hear me out, okay? I saw that you paid the rooftop reservation fee with two credit cards: a Coinbase card, and a regular Visa. That Coinbase card is what interested me the most. It’s attached to several cryptocurrency wallets with extensive transaction histories. All totally visible on the various blockchains. Normally, I wouldn’t know who owns the addresses, but that Coinbase card gave me an entry point to track your history.”
By now, I was frozen in place, numb to what he was going to say.
Jude smiled apologetically. “I must admit that it took a while to follow the breadcrumbs. You ran your crypto through several mixers to try to obfuscate the trail, but there are ways to trace that, too, and I’m lucky enough to have quite a few connections in the crypto space. I was able to track it back to the originating address. A wallet full of ArgoCoin, a token-based proof-of-work cryptocurrency.”
He took a deep breath before continuing, knowing that he was revealing one of my deepest, darkest secrets. “The wallet contained thirty million ArgoCoin. They were only worth about nine cents each at the time, but that still came out to be almost three million dollars. Only three wallets contained that much ArgoCoin back then. The three computer programmers who created the cryptocurrency. Sam Clyburn was one. Han Hiroshoto was another. And the third was an anonymous programmer based somewhere in the Bay Area…”
