Train Wreck

Chapter 1

The first illegal thing I ever did happened three days after my twin brother’s funeral.

By then, the flowers had started to die.

The white lilies lining the hallway were already curling at the edges, and the house smelled like perfume, stale coffee, and people who had stayed longer than they should have.

It was finally quiet.

For the first time in three days, nobody was crying downstairs. Nobody was knocking on my bedroom door to ask if I’d eaten. Nobody was telling me Adrian was “in a better place.”

I didn’t want him in a better place.

I wanted him here.

I stood outside his bedroom for a long time before turning the handle.

Nothing had changed.

His blazer was draped over the chair exactly the way he always left it. A notebook lay open on his desk, a pen resting across the page as though he’d only stepped out for a minute.

Someone had made the bed.

That annoyed me more than it should have.

Adrian never made his bed.

I walked over and pulled the duvet back just enough to wrinkle it again.

“There,” I whispered.

“That’s better.”

For a second, I almost smiled.

Then I remembered why I was there.

His phone sat on the bedside table, plugged into the charger.

Nobody had touched it.

I picked it up carefully, turning it over in my hands. I wanted to open his phone but it felt wrong, it felt personal.

Except Adrian had never really believed in privacy when it came to us.

We’d shared everything growing up.

Somehow, sometimes, I’d still felt like there wew so many things i didn’t know about him.

He wasn’t here anymore and I miss him. Going through his phone would comfort me.

I presses the on button and the screen lit up.

Enter Passcode.

I typed our birthday.

Wrong.

I frowned.

Adrian had been using some version of that password since we were thirteen.

“You changed it?”

The words slipped out before I could stop them.

For some reason, that hurt more than it should have.

It wasn’t the password.

It was the thought that there had been a part of his life I hadn’t been invited into.

I sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the screen.

I could put the phone back.

Walk out.

Pretend I’d never come in here.

Maybe that’s what a normal person would do.

Unfortunately, curiosity had never been something I could switch off.

It was the reason I’d taken apart my first computer when I was eleven.

The reason I’d once spent two weeks trying to figure out why my father’s encrypted work files kept pinging a server in Iceland.

The reason Adrian used to laugh and tell me that one day, my curiosity was going to get me into serious trouble.

I opened my backpack.

My laptop slid onto the desk, followed by a cable I’d soldered together months ago.

The software on my laptop loaded and a string of commands flashed across the screen.

Most phones were designed to keep people out.

That only made them more interesting.

It took me twelve minutes to break into his phone.

Long enough for frustration to settle into determination.

I let out a slow breath.

“Thanks,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure whether I was talking to the software or to Adrian.

At first, everything looked ordinary, too ordinary.

Adrian wasn’t messy, but he wasn’t this tidy either.

He never deleted conversations.

He kept receipts from years ago because, according to him, “you never know.”

Now there was almost nothing.

Someone had cleaned this phone.

Not well enough to fool me.

Just well enough to fool everyone else.

I dug a little deeper.

Hidden beneath the phone’s main storage was an encrypted partition.

Easy to miss, but exactly the sort of thing Adrian would’ve known I’d eventually find.

I clicked on it.

A password prompt appeared.

“You really couldn’t make this easy, could you?”

I thought about the things that mattered to him.

Not the things everyone else associated with Adrian Ashford.

The things only I would know.

I entered a single word.

The folder opened.

Inside was one message.

No contact name.

Just a timestamp from the night he died.

There were only seven words.

See you where we buried it.

Below it…

A set of coordinates.

I stared at the screen.

My pulse quickened.

Buried what?