He had shaken Leah’s hand at the door and looked at her with the faint impatience of a man who had already categorized her and was moving on.
She had smiled and gone in.
Leah had been working in cybersecurity for four years. She had started as an in-house analyst at a regional bank, moved to contract work after her second year because the money was better and the scope was broader, and had spent the past two years building a client list that included a hospital system, two insurance carriers, a mid-size pharmaceutical company, and the healthcare compliance firm currently paying her to trace a specific data exposure. She worked odd hours, kept meticulous records, and had once spent eleven days documenting a supply-chain vulnerability for a client who subsequently had to notify forty thousand patients that their billing information had been accessible to unauthorized parties for a period of months.
She did not describe this as playing around on the internet.
Nobody who understood it would.
But explaining it to Raymond over his roast was not what she had arrived prepared to do, because she had not expected to need to. She had expected a dinner. She had received a demonstration.