“Uh-oh,” Sydney said when she plopped back down on the couch beside me, leaning on the arm of the couch with one elbow. “Don’t tell me you got another new trick play idea or the sudden urge to watch defense tapes. We were just getting to the good part.”
She smirked, nodding toward the TV where the witches were paused on the screen, and I reached over to squeeze her knee.
“I want to show you something.”
Sydney rolled her eyes, but scooted closer, wrapping her arm under mine and reaching for her phone. “Fine. But I’m setting a timer, and after twenty minutes, no more football talk until the movie’s over. I don’t care how close we are to playoffs.”
“It’s not football-related.”
Sydney paused where she was reaching for her phone, her little mouth popping open into a soft o. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to hide my shock.”
She was teasing, but when she saw the sincerity on my face, her brows tugged together.
“What is it?”
My heart stopped altogether on my next breath, and I held it, turning my laptop until she could see the screen.
I watched as Sydney’s eyes roamed, her frown deepening the more she looked. “I don’t understand… what am I looking at? It’s like…” She reached for the computer, pulling it into her own lap for a closer look. “It’s like an old processor or something. Is this Windows Vista?”
“Mm-hmm.”
She frowned more, shaking her head at the document I had open. “And this is… well, part of it is in Latin, I think? But…” Her eyebrows softened, lips parting. “It says your father’s name. It says… it’s talking about the distillery.” Sydney’s eyes slowly found mine. “Jordan, what is this?”
I swallowed, realizing the jolt of nerves in my stomach wasn’t because I was afraid to tell Sydney about what my brothers and I had found.
It was because I’d found someone I wanted to share it with.
“It’s my dad’s journal.”
The tension between her brows released, her eyes widening. “Your… your dad’s journal?”
I nodded, pointing to the hard drive plugged into the side of my laptop. “It’s a long story, but… well, essentially, Logan and Mallory found this old, burned up, useless computer when they were tasked to clean out a storage closet at the distillery. He managed to get the hard drive out of it, and used this external hard drive,” I said, tapping the large silver square. “To host it, I guess. It pulled up dad’s computer as if we were logging onto it, but the problem was… it was password protected.”
Sydney listened intently, her eyes ever-widening.
“Mikey’s girlfriend — well, she was his friend at the time, but that’s another story — she’s smart, and has always had a fascination with coding and such. So, the two of them worked on trying to break into it. One day… they did.”
“Whoa…” Sydney looked back at the screen. “And they found this?”
“Among other things. It was mostly work files and emails and such, when they first started looking, but then Mikey found the journal. And see,” I said, reaching over to scroll on the mousepad until the beginning entries were on the screen. “At first, it’s just a normal journal — and really, it’s more like a daily log. Boring stuff. Him going to meetings, notes on what he needs to accomplish that week, random reminders. But then, something strange happens.”
“He starts writing in Latin,” Sydney finishes for me, scrolling down to the first entry in the old language.
“He starts writing in Latin,” I echo. “My brothers were confused, but I remember when Dad got on this kick about how so many of our words are based in the Latin language, and how he read an article that if you learn Latin, it’s a gateway to learn pretty much any other language in the world. I remember him listening to the tapes and studying this giant book he’d bought on it. And I got into it, too,” I added with a shrug. “It was kind of fun. Challenging. And it was time with my dad, you know?”
Sydney’s mouth pulled to one side, and she reached over, grabbing my hand.
“Anyway, I told my brother’s that with some time and some online translation tools, I thought I could go through and figure out what he was writing… see if it was anything important.”
“That’s what I guess I’m missing here,” she said, glancing at the screen and back at me. “I mean, I think it’s cool that you found your dad’s journal, but you’re just… reading it? Kind of seems like an invasion of privacy. Don’t get me wrong,” she said quickly. “I’m sure it feels good to be close to him in a way again, and have access to what he was thinking each day, but…”
“It’s not about that,” I explained. “Think about it, Sydney. When Logan found the laptop, it was in a box that had been stuffed in a corner, covered by other tubs and boxes, in an old storage room that no one touched for almost ten years. And in that same box, there were charred things from my dad’s desk — a picture of our family at the lake, a paper weight with a favorite quote of his, and some other things.”