Chapter 285

Malcolm burst out laughing on the other end of the line.

“Ah, they really took the wind out of me.”

“How exactly did they do that?”

Malcolm didn’t answer.

“You’re not going to tell me even if I ask, are you?”

There was no reply from Malcolm. Not even the sound of breathing, to the point she wondered if the call had been cut.

“Just answer me one thing. Are you involved in something dangerous?”

Instead of an answer, Malcolm let out a long sigh. He opened his mouth only when Hannah’s patience was nearly scorched to white ash, and even then, it wasn’t the answer she wanted.

“How’s Joshua?”

“You’re changing the subject again. ...Joshua is doing fine. His upper teeth are coming in now. I think it itches and hurts, he cries all day.”

“I see.”

“I’ll send you a picture.”

“...Do that if you want. Anyway, call me if something happens.”

Once he heard how his grandchild was doing, Malcolm hung up immediately. He was a man with hardly a gentle bone in his body. Even after thirty years of marriage, Hannah still couldn’t quite believe she had married a man so dry and so determined to say only what he wanted to say. Once upon a time, she had dreamed of a whirlwind romance with a handsome young man. But by the time she came to her senses after pouring herself into her husband and children day after day, so many years had passed. Meeting a young, good-looking man now would only be possible in another life—perhaps after several lives.

The brief improvement in her mood as she thought of Baekgyeong and Yoon Siron, two strikingly handsome men, quickly soured again when she thought of her daughter. Her daughter had given birth to a child with a man whose identity she couldn’t even guess, and her husband had become entangled with the son of a conglomerate family whose disappearance was being broadcast all over the news.

She had lived without any major crises until now, in relative safety, but after spending more than twenty years living in the dens of criminals, she was like a herbivore who grazed while constantly scanning for predators, always wary of danger that might come without warning. And now, her refined instinct was sending her a warning signal that Angela and her husband had become involved in something dangerous.

Ding— Ding—.

A concise electronic tone echoed through the stillness. Startled, she soothed the baby awake and crying in her arms as she hurried to the front door. On the intercom screen stood a man who looked to be in his mid-forties, holding a cardboard box. He was the condo’s concierge—one of the staff responsible for resident support services.

Hannah patted Joshua’s back as he cried and opened the door.

“Good morning, Mrs. Knox.”

The concierge smiled warmly at the crying baby and Hannah.

“A package arrived for Ms. Angela around midnight yesterday. She requested not to receive concierge deliveries after midnight, so I’m delivering it this morning. Is Ms. Angela here?”

“Ah, my daughter went to work. May I receive it on her behalf?”

“Of course.”

Hannah signed Angela’s name on the delivery receipt and took the package inside.

“Joshua. Why is your voice so loud? Goodness, you’re going to burst your grandmother’s eardrums.”

Hannah bounced Joshua on her back, swaying and shushing him, as she opened the pantry by the entryway to store the package. She lifted the box onto a nearby shelf and was about to close the door and leave when Angela’s words from that morning surfaced in her mind.

“I’m thinking of going to live in Switzerland. ...What do you think? Would you be really upset?”

Her daughter lived in a luxurious penthouse overlooking Manhattan, far beyond anything their family had ever dreamed of, yet she wanted to quit her job and leave for Switzerland. Hannah couldn’t fathom why.

Her gaze returned to the closed pantry door. The package that had supposedly arrived at midnight bothered her. A package delivered at a time when everyone should have been asleep meant someone had arranged for it to be delivered specifically to Angela, without the children noticing. Which meant there was no way her daughter had ordered it herself.

Hannah’s expression hardened like stone. She stepped back into the pantry, took the package down from the shelf, and opened it. Inside was a laptop. It looked almost new, though there were slight signs of use. On top of it sat a card, as if typed on a typewriter.

A gift for you and Joshua, perhaps the last one.

Hannah’s face flushed red as she read the card. Heat rushed to her head, and her breath caught in her throat. There was no doubt the package had come from that unknown man who was steering her daughter’s life as he pleased.

“‘Perhaps the last one’? Is he telling them to disappear from our lives, or what?”

Seized by agitation, Hannah hurried into the dining room and set the laptop on the table. She sat on the edge of a chair, patting the fussy Joshua with one hand while pressing the power button with the other.

The desktop appeared immediately. In the center was a single text file. Inside, it read: You’re probably curious about the gift. Someone as perceptive as you will understand on your own. Until then, do not connect this laptop to any network.

“‘Don’t connect it to a network’... So don’t use the internet? Then what’s the point of using a laptop?”

It was clearly no ordinary laptop. Hannah recalled the computer literacy class she had taken last winter and began checking through the drives one by one. Eventually, she found a strangely named folder locked with a password.

The name of the first gift I gave you.

It was a frustrating hint. Hannah didn’t even know who the man was—how could she know the first gift he had given Angela? She tried to think back on her daughter’s past relationships. During the time Angela had lived with them after the divorce, she had come home late several times. They were all dates, always with the same person. The first date had come at a completely unexpected time, through an odd sequence of events.

Her daughter had said she was going to attend some kind of group therapy run by an organization whose name sounded dubious. Then, late at night, she had returned home with a large bouquet of flowers. Under Hannah’s persistent questioning about who and what, Angela had reluctantly admitted the unexpected date.

“Anemone flowers have the meaning of both hope and surrender. I don’t know how to deal with a man who gives flowers like that on a first date.”

Angela had spoken with a shadowed, troubled expression, and Hannah had been certain her daughter had gotten involved with a man whose mind was not in the right place. She had regretted, ever since, that she hadn’t followed her daughter around with packed meals to monitor that relationship.

With a heavy feeling, she typed “Anemone” into the password input.

Thankfully, the folder unlocked immediately. Inside were six files. One was a text file with no title. The others were named wallet.dat(1), wallet.dat(2), wallet.dat(3), wallet.dat(4), wallet.dat(5).

Hannah opened the text file first.

I’ve already issued your ticket.

October 17, 11:00 PM.

John F. Kennedy International Airport, Terminal 4, Main Hall.

I’ll be on the bench to the left of the Swiss Air counter, waiting for you and Joshua.

Hannah stared at the letters in the text file, her expression frozen. How dare this unknown man attempt to steal her precious daughter from her life. Rage surged up, and she almost deleted the file on sight and hid the laptop away, but she snapped a picture of the memo with her phone first—just in case.

Then, without hesitation, she deleted the memo file.

Her whole body trembling, she closed her eyes and tried to calm herself for a long time before she could gather the courage to open the remaining files.

She wanted to smash the laptop to pieces, but she needed to identify the man who had intruded like an uninvited guest into her daughter’s life.

“A wallet?”

Worried she might ruin everything by touching the wrong thing, she clicked a file anyway. But nothing happened. Without any program installed to open it, the laptop defaulted to opening it in plain text. The file was filled with broken, unreadable characters.

“What... is this?”

If this was truly a gift for Angela and Joshua, it could not be worthless. Closing the file, Hannah searched “wallet.dat” on her phone.

After going through multiple pages, she found a blog post explaining that wallet.dat was an essential file for cryptocurrency wallets. The blog said that the wallet.dat file contained the private key, public key, wallet address, and transaction history necessary to access cryptocurrency, and warned to be careful not to let it get hacked. Every word was difficult to understand.

“...DeepCoin? And what is that supposed to be?”

Like solving a difficult math problem, she painstakingly deciphered the meanings until she could roughly grasp what wallet.dat and DeepCoin were.

“So... it’s basically internet money that’s hard to trace to the owner?”

Internet money. There was no positive interpretation she could give that. Why abandon stable dollars to use untraceable internet money? Suspicion tightened inside her like a knot as she stared at the laptop. She wasn’t sure she should tell Angela about the package or give her the laptop at all.

Just then, the sleeping Joshua tensed in her arms. He squirmed and began pushing against her with surprising strength, then suddenly burst into loud, desperate crying. Only then did Hannah realize mealtime was long overdue.

But she didn’t stand up immediately. Instead, she looked down at the baby’s face, as if searching for traces of an unfamiliar man’s features. The longer she looked, the more anxious she became about the man her daughter was involved with.