Story code: ST-000702
Part 3: The Saved Browser
I drove from the station to my mother’s house with Officer Ortiz’s instructions repeating in my head: do not let anyone clean anything up, do not sign in and out, document first. By the time I pulled into the driveway, Evan’s car was already there crooked near the garage like he had come in too fast.
The front door was unlocked. My mother was standing in the hall with a small spiral notebook in one hand and a dish towel in the other, twisting both without noticing. Evan was at the dining room end of the hall with his laptop open on the table. He looked at my phone before he looked at my face.
“I told you not to touch anything,” I said.
“I didn’t delete anything.” His voice came quick, defensive, already halfway to an argument. “I just opened the browser to see what was still there.”
My mother lifted the notebook a little. “He said you needed the old passwords.”
“Put that down for a second, Mom. Please.”
I took pictures first. The laptop screen. The browser window. The account page that still showed the familiar cloud storage menu and, under devices, the name of my old phone and the one in my hand now. My pulse jumped so hard in my throat I had to steady my wrist against the table to keep the image from blurring.
“Scroll up,” I said.
Evan hesitated.
“Scroll.”
He did. At the top right, my name was still there. Not his. Mine.
“How long has this been saved?”
“I don’t know exactly. Since I transferred your stuff, probably. I forgot about it.”
“Forgot” sat there like a cheap lid over something messier. I took another picture. Then I opened the browser settings on my phone and called up the note I had made at the station.
“Show me the saved passwords.”
“Maya, this is making it look worse than it is.”
“Show me.”
He clicked through with his jaw tight. There it was: the family recovery email autofilling under my account login, and beneath it a saved entry for the cloud account. Not the password itself, but enough of a stored sign-in that anyone sitting at his laptop could get to the point where a recovery prompt did the rest.
My mother set the notebook down on the counter so carefully it made almost no sound.
“Can someone explain this in plain English?” she asked.
I kept my eyes on the screen. “It means my account was still reachable from his computer.”
Evan cut in fast. “Reachable if someone already had the machine in front of them and knew what they were doing. It’s not like I handed Derek a folder marked Maya’s photos.”
That was the first clean thing he had said. Not a yes-or-no answer. Not an accident. A shape.
I looked at him. “He used your laptop here.”
“A couple times.”
“While you were logged into my account?”
His silence was answer enough that I didn’t have to guess beyond it.
My mother spoke into that gap. “Did Derek see her pictures?”
Evan rubbed both hands over his face and dropped them. “I don’t know what he saw. I left him in here once when I was outside helping Mom with the groceries and once when I ran to the garage because he said he needed a charging cable. I didn’t think he could do anything from a browser page.” He pointed at the screen without touching it. “Then after Maya broke up with him, he texted me asking weird questions about backups and whether old devices still sync. I thought he was being pathetic. I answered him twice. That’s it.”
“You answered him how?”
He swallowed. “I told him if photos ever existed in cloud backup, deleting them off a phone didn’t always mean they were gone everywhere. I told him people forget browser saves and recovery addresses. I didn’t give him your password.”
The room got very still after that. Not dramatic stillness. House stillness. Refrigerator hum. Ice maker knocking once inside the freezer. My mother picked up the dish towel again and folded it into a smaller square and then a smaller one.
I could hear the lane clearly now because he had finally stopped hiding inside technical wording. Derek had not needed magic. He had needed an opening, a familiar house, and somebody careless enough to treat my privacy like background noise.
My phone buzzed in my hand. Derek.
I opened the text while both of them watched.
You figure it out yet?
A second message came before I could answer.
Tell your brother I said thanks for the tutorial.
I turned the screen toward Evan. Whatever he felt, I only saw it as a sharp step backward and his hand coming off the laptop as if it had become hot.
Then my mother did something she almost never did. She reached across me, closed the laptop with one flat push, and said to Evan, very quietly, “Give me your house key until this is sorted out.”
He stared at her. “Mom.”
“Now.”
He set the key on the table beside my printed screenshots. I looked at the metal against the paper and understood that by morning I could hand Officer Ortiz enough to force this wider than our walls. I also understood exactly whose face my mother would have to live with after that.