The Two Hundred Dollar Check
I raised my glass and thanked my grandfather for the two hundred dollars. He stopped carving the turkey, looked up with sharp eyes, and asked what two hundred dollars I meant. Then he told the entire table that the gift he’d wired me was actually five hundred thousand dollars.
In the silence that followed, I realized someone at this table had stolen a fortune, completely unaware that my actual job is hunting down people who leave digital footprints.
My name is Layla Alexander. I’m thirty-two and I work as a Senior Cyber Security Analyst at Helixgate Analytics in Denver. I hunt anomalies for a living—the single line of code that breaks the pattern, the ghost login at three in the morning, the fraction of a cent siphoned into an offshore account. I trust data because numbers don’t lie to protect your feelings, and they certainly don’t smile while picking your pocket.
Returning to Redwood Falls for Thanksgiving always felt like stepping out of a high-speed server room into a sepia photograph. The town didn’t change—the air was thinner, colder, smelling of pine needles and wood smoke. My grandfather Walter King’s estate sat on a ridge overlooking the valley, a sprawling Victorian manor that looked exactly as it had when I was a child. It was a house built on old money and older values, or at least that was the facade we polished every November.
The house was warm when I arrived, heavy oak door opening to the scent of roasting rosemary and cinnamon. The lighting was low and golden, casting comfortable shadows against mahogany paneling. At seventy-eight, Walter was still the man who’d built a local real estate empire from a single hardware store, still sitting in his leather wingback chair like a retired general reviewing his troops. When he saw me, his face broke into a genuine grin that made the wrinkles around his eyes deepen in a way I loved.
Then there was the rest of the cast. My father Daniel stood by the fireplace, a quiet accountant who’d spent thirty years balancing books that never quite made him rich. He held his wine glass with a tightness that suggested he was afraid someone might take it away. My mother Rebecca fluttered between kitchen and living room, movements frantic and birdlike—a retired elementary school teacher who treated every family gathering like a performance review.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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