Chapter 1 The Proposal Hijack
# Chapter 1: The Proposal Hijack
I've always believed that the most important lines of code are the ones that protect what matters most. That philosophy built my career as a programmer and saved my children from a life without their mother. My name is Wilona Greenwood, and this is how three little hackers changed everything.
"Mommy, can we have ice cream after school?" Lily tugged at my sleeve as I braided her hair. At five years old, she was already the mastermind of the triplets, with light hazel eyes that reminded me too much of their father.
"Only if you promise not to hack anything today," I replied, tying off her braid with a pink ribbon.
She pouted, those familiar eyes widening innocently. "I didn't hack anything yesterday."
"The school vending machine giving free chocolate doesn't count?" I raised an eyebrow, and she giggled.
"That was Ethan! I just... supervised."
I sighed, finishing the last touches on her uniform. Being a single mother to triplets was challenging enough. Being a single mother to triplets who could code before they could properly write was something else entirely. The boys, Ethan and Oliver, were already at the breakfast table, suspiciously quiet as they huddled over a tablet.
"What are you two plotting?" I asked, pouring cereal into their bowls.
"Nothing!" they chorused, the tablet disappearing under the table faster than I could blink.
I chose not to press. Five years of raising these three had taught me to pick my battles. Sometimes their pranks were harmless enough—like reprogramming the refrigerator to play the Star Wars theme when opened. Other times, well... let's just say I'd become very familiar with apologizing to their preschool's IT department.
"Eat up, we need to leave in ten minutes."
The morning routine was our dance—breakfast, teeth brushing, last-minute homework checks (despite my insistence that they do it the night before), and finally, the drive to Sunshine Kindergarten. I dropped them off with the usual warnings about behaving, knowing full well they'd find some technological loophole in my instructions.
"Love you, be good!" I called after them.
Lily turned back, her small face suddenly serious. "Remember what we practiced, Mommy. If anyone asks about Daddy, he's—"
"An astronaut lost in space," I finished our rehearsed line, feeling the familiar twist in my gut. "I remember, sweetheart."
The lie had started when they were three and asking questions I couldn't answer. How do you tell your children that their father doesn't know they exist because you faked your own death to protect them? That the man who broke your heart is Ted Preston, tech billionaire and media darling, whose face occasionally appears on business magazines I quickly hide?
I watched them disappear into their classroom before heading to my nondescript office building where I worked remotely as a security consultant under a carefully constructed identity. The irony wasn't lost on me—I used to build firewalls against hackers, and now I was raising three of them.
The day proceeded normally until lunchtime, when my phone exploded with notifications. A coworker burst into my office without knocking.
"Have you seen this?" she thrust her phone at me. "It's all over the internet!"
My blood froze as I watched the video. A massive drone light show above the city center—hundreds of synchronized drones forming a proposal message in the night sky. But instead of whatever romantic gesture was planned, the drones had rearranged to spell out: "MOMMY, RUN! HE HAS 10 BILLION TO TRICK YOU INTO HAVING FOUR KIDS!"
The camera panned down to capture the horrified face of Ted Preston, standing next to a shocked woman in an evening gown. The woman—who I recognized as Vivian Chen, heiress to Chen Technologies—was backing away while Ted frantically spoke into his phone.
"Someone hacked the drones!" my coworker laughed. "Can you imagine spending all that money just to have your proposal hijacked?"
I couldn't breathe. The drones. The message. The reference to "Mommy." This wasn't random.
"I—I need to make a call," I managed, ushering her out of my office before collapsing into my chair.
With trembling fingers, I called the school, only to be told that my children were perfectly fine and currently in their computer lab time. Of course they were.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze of panic. By the time I arrived at school for pickup, my composure was held together by the thinnest thread. I spotted Lily immediately, her pink backpack bobbing as she skipped toward me.
"Hi, Mommy!" she chirped, too cheerful. The boys followed more cautiously behind.
"What did you do?" I whispered, kneeling to her level.
"We just went to school like you said," Oliver answered, not meeting my eyes.
"There's a video trending of a drone hack that looks very familiar to something you three might do."
Ethan's face twitched. "Maybe the drones had a bug?"
"A bug that specifically mentioned mommies and billions of dollars?"
Lily squared her tiny shoulders. "He deserved it."
Before I could respond, I noticed her discreetly dropping something into the playground trash can—a small drive that I had no doubt contained evidence of whatever they'd done.
"Lily Grace Greenwood," I used her full name, my voice low. "What did you just throw away?"
"Nothing," she said, but her defiant whisper told a different story as she added, "Stupid Daddy deserves it."
My heart stopped. In five years, I'd never told them who their father was. I'd been so careful, removing all traces of Ted Preston from our lives. How had they found out? What else did they know? And most importantly—what had they just done that could expose us all?
"We're going home. Now." I gathered them close, scanning the schoolyard for unfamiliar faces, the weight of our carefully constructed life suddenly feeling very precarious.
What I didn't know then was that 500 miles away, Ted Preston was already combing through the IP address that had hijacked his proposal, his face growing paler by the second as it led him straight to a kindergarten in a quiet suburb—and ultimately, to the woman he thought had died five years ago.
