My life plan was straightforward, quiet, and completely devoid of drama: spend the next forty years as an unbothered software architect, running regression tests in a dimly lit room and letting the world spin without me. Then my grandfather staged a medical intervention from his armchair and essentially threatened to haunt me if I didn’t resign from my boutique tech firm to marry Sloane Sullivan. On our wedding night, Sloane bypassed the champagne and slapped a binding postnuptial separation agreement onto the polished mahogany desk. "This is nothing more than our grandfathers' stubborn, sentimental pact," she said, her voice carrying the crisp, unyielding cadence of an executive delivering an earnings report. "We live strictly separate lives under this roof. I happen to be a sapiosexual, and I’ve had someone in my heart since high school. The minute he finishes his overseas venture and returns to the States, we file for an uncontested divorce." I glanced down at the financial clause on the final page. The severance sum she was offering was large enough to keep a dedicated high-performance server cluster humming for an entire decade. Sign it? I didn't even hesitate. "Don't worry, Ms. Sullivan," I told her, clicking the cap back onto my pen. "The only partner I’m interested in committing to is one I compile from scratch. Biological humans require far too much maintenance." I hauled my dual monitors, mechanical keyboards, and reference books into the study at the very end of the second-floor hallway, closed the door, and went to work. Then came Day 101. Sloane Sullivan finally lost her composure. 1 Sloane was standing barefoot in the frame of my study door. Her auburn hair was still damp from the shower, a stray droplet of water catching the track lighting on the curve of her bare shoulder. When my gaze drifted over, I caught the slight, unmistakable tremor in her knees. A subtle, feverish flush was creeping along the pale skin exposed beneath the hem of her short navy silk slip. I forced my fingers back onto the home row, keeping the click of the mechanical switches steady. "Ms. Sullivan, you laid out the parameters on night one. Strictly parallel lives. There's really no need for you to run an entrapment test." She froze, clearly wrestling with her pride, the redness climbing from behind her ears down toward her collarbone. "I just wanted to verify," she muttered, her chin tipping up defensively. "We share an entire penthouse every single day. Do you really have zero reaction? Am I... completely lacking in basic appeal?" I turn my face to her. Her breath hitched. "What are you staring at?" "Evaluating the dataset," I said evenly. "You have plenty of appeal. In fact, you're easily in the ninety-eighth percentile of aesthetic beauty. On any given street in Manhattan, ninety-eight out of a hundred people would turn their heads. The remaining two are legally blind." She looked down at her toes, her voice dropping an octave. "And you? Are you in that ninety-eight?" I raised both hands in a non-committal shrug. "Like I told you on day one, Ms. Sullivan: the only companion I’m building is digital. Sloane’s expression sharpened, her corporate composure shattering into sheer exasperation. "Are you out of your mind? Can a string of Python scripts give you children? Can an algorithm keep your side of the bed warm at night?" "As of right now, conversation is about the limit of the model," I replied with absolute sincerity. "For thermal regulation or biological progeny, we’ll have to wait until synthetic bionics catch up." "You—!" She took two sharp, ragged breaths, spun on her heel, and stormed down the corridor. I picked up my cold mug and drained two ounces of bitter, hours-old dark roast. Something was deeply off. She had brought up her untouchable high school crush on multiple occasions. He had attended our rival private academy across town—the same district where I went to school. According to her, during a statewide mathematics championship, she had collided with him in a crowded hallway outside the examination hall. Their study binders had spilled across the linoleum, papers everywhere. When she accidentally grabbed one of his scratch sheets, she discovered that a grueling higher-order function problem she couldn't solve had been worked out by him using five distinct proofs. To be completely candid, I thought that was pretty average work. When I was seventeen, five proofs was my baseline for a warm-up. Yet to Sloane, that fleeting glimpse of brilliance had cast him in bronze. She had carried the memory of that awkward boy with the thick tortoiseshell glasses and the messy bowl cut like a sacred talisman. The problem was, half the nerds in our prep league—myself included back then—wore that exact same haircut and wire-rimmed glasses. She had never caught his name. She lost track of him entirely until a chance encounter after college graduation put him back on her radar. During our first month of marriage, Sloane had treated our home like a corporate headquarters. She wore structured trousers and long-sleeved silk blouses, never showing an inch of skin below her wrists. Whenever she spoke to me, her tone sounded like an automated customer service ticket: Thank you for your assistance. Much appreciated. That will be all. Once, when I walked out to the kitchen island for a glass of water, she had just stepped out of the master bathroom. The moment she saw me, she practically rebounded into the doorway, holding the door ajar by an inch and politely asking me to pass before she dared to step into the common hallway. Before that night, I hadn't even known she had a small, dark beauty mark on the inside of her left ankle. And now here she was—kicking open my heavy solid-core study door in a midnight-blue silk slip, barefoot, demanding an audit of her personal magnetism. The next morning, when I stepped out of the study, our housekeeper, Mrs. Gable, was clearing the low slate coffee table in the living room. There were three crystal tumblers sitting on the tray: two from the previous night, and one from this morning. Each was filled with an inch of unfinished bourbon. Mrs. Gable set the glasses down with a quiet clink. "Is Ms. Sullivan under a lot of stress lately? She sat out here until nearly three in the morning. She’d pour a glass, take a single sip, forget about it, and pour another. Completely lost in thought." "Really?" "Yes. And then she was up by six-thirty, did forty minutes on the Peloton, and immediately asked if you were awake yet." "She asked about me?" "She did," Mrs. Gable said smoothly. "I told her the study door was still firmly closed. She just nodded, said she already knew, and walked off." Mrs. Gable carried the tray into the kitchen. I stood in the sunlit hallway, thinking back to the very first time Sloane Sullivan had slipped off her rigid corporate track. It had happened on our forty-third night together. 2 It was just past eleven on a Tuesday when the primary database servers for Sloane’s logistics platform were hit by a coordinated, distributed zero-day attack. Her VP of Engineering had called her in a full-blown panic. Some sophisticated foreign threat actor had deployed a polymorphic encryption wrapper across their entire cluster, locking down the core database. Sloane was pacing the living room rug, her voice hushed, but the open layout carried every word. "What did Derek Shaw say?" she pressed into the receiver. "You said he had elite contacts in enterprise cybersecurity." A beat of silence. "His cell is going straight to voicemail." "We have until eight tomorrow morning before the regional hubs open," she whispered, the strain cracking through her composure. "If the dispatch routing stays down, we’re looking at an eight-figure liability." The voice on the other end must have suggested bringing in outside family resources, because Sloane fell quiet for several long seconds. "No," she said softly, almost painfully. "He's in the middle of a build. Don't disturb him." That he was me. And the quiet, uncharacteristic humility in her voice made it impossible for me to stay behind my desk. I opened the study door and nearly stepped on her. Sloane was sitting flat on the hardwood floor against the wall, looking up at me. Her hair was pulled into a messy, unraveling knot, her mascara was smudged at the corners of her eyes, and a faint coffee ring stained the corner of her lower lip. It was the first time she had ever looked vulnerable in front of me. "Did I wake you?" she murmured, pulling her knees to her chest. "I’m sorry..." "Give me the bastion host IP." "What?" I reached down, took her company phone from her fingers, and scrolled through the crash dumps her VP had texted over. "Custom Linux kernel," I noted, scanning the hex offsets. "They used an ARP spoofing vector layered over an asymmetric SYN flood, and now the entire partition is locked under a dynamic AES-256 container. Tell your infrastructure team to stop issuing brute-force commands. The payload has a self-mutating trigger; every failed attempt doubles the key derivation time." Her eyes widened slightly. "You can... resolve that?" "Drop the question mark." "I didn't use a question mark," she whispered under her breath. I was already heading back into the study. Sloane scrambled up and followed me inside. When she saw my vertical triple-monitor rig—lines of raw C and shell scripts flashing across seven different active terminal windows—her eyes went completely round. For the next forty minutes, Sloane didn't make a sound. She told me later that she couldn't understand a single line of what was on the screens, but her phone was vibrating nonstop with frantic, incredulous messages from her VP of Engineering. I traced the malicious command-and-control node back to an illicit server farm operating out of an abandoned warehouse on the south side of town. While clearing her database, I quietly deployed a reverse honeypot, mirrored their incoming traffic, and extracted their entire attack registry back to our local drive. System restored. Zero data loss. I closed the master terminal, leaned back, and took a sip of water. Sloane was staring at me as if the laws of physics had just been rewritten in front of her. "Nate," she said, her voice dropping into a business pitch. "I'll create an executive technical advisory role for you tomorrow. Name your compensation package." I looked at her calmly. "I prefer writing the code I care about, Ms. Sullivan. If you ever hit an emergency, you're welcome to knock. But I don't do corporate payrolls. I value my autonomy." A brief flicker of disappointment crossed her face, but beneath it was something warmer—a quiet, admiring spark. "I suppose that makes sense. A lot of true tech pioneers are like that." She paused, clearing her throat. "Anyway... thank you. I owe you for this." I offered a faint smile. "Next time, just walk in and knock. Sitting on the bare hallway floor is a great way to catch a cold." She glanced down at her bare feet, and the tips of her ears flushed a deep, unmistakable crimson. 3 After that night, our strictly contractual dynamic began to fracture. On Day 47, an ultra-quiet, commercial-grade hot water dispenser appeared on the sideboard in my study. It was finished in matte black, with precision temperature controls. Mrs. Gable informed me that Sloane had ordered it directly from an industrial supplier. "Ms. Sullivan noticed that you walk all the way to the kitchen three or four times a night for hot water. She said pacing down that drafty corridor wasn't good for you." From my study door to the kitchen island was exactly twenty paces. From Sloane's master suite to the kitchen was at least forty. She had lived in this penthouse for six years and had never once bought a hot water dispenser for herself. "And," Mrs. Gable added, her face perfectly straight though her eyes twinkled with quiet amusement, "Ms. Sullivan insisted the heating element must remain on at all times. She said your stomach is too sensitive for cold beverages." On Day 49, she knocked on my door carrying a lush, potted golden pothos. "The humidity in here is terrible," she announced briskly, setting it down on the corner of my credenza. "Greenery reduces eye strain from excessive screen time." She didn't wait for a response. She dropped the planter and vanished down the hall like a startled deer. By Day 53, Sloane had established an undeclared territory on the oversized leather lounger in the corner of my study. She never announced her arrival, nor did she say goodbye. She would simply walk in with her ultralight laptop, sink naturally into the deep cushion she had slowly contoured to her body, and begin answering high-level board emails. She wouldn't utter a word for three hours straight—silent, composed, and tucked away like an indoor cat seeking the warmest patch of carpet. On Day 55, she went a step further: she fell completely asleep. At one in the morning, having just completed an automated test cycle, I turned my chair around. Sloane was curled into a tight ball, her knees tucked against her ribs, her breathing rhythmic and soft. Asleep, the formidable CEO looked remarkably petite. I picked up a charcoal cashmere throw from the back of the sofa and draped it gently over her shoulders. She didn't stir. I turned back to my keyboards to tackle a lingering logic bug. I worked until the gray dawn broke over the city skyline, but strangely enough, despite spending four hours in the compiler, I didn't manage to fix a single line. 4 On Day 60, Sloane brought a bottle of vintage Pinot Noir into the study and asked if I’d have a drink with her. She said the quarterly board meeting had been exhausting and that she just needed a distraction. After barely half a glass, she had abandoned her laptop, curling sideways into the lounger and resting her feet on the low walnut coffee table. Her toenails were painted with a sheer, glossy topcoat that caught the soft ambient glow of the floor lamp. The small dark mole on the inside of her left ankle was positioned directly in my line of sight. "Sloane." "Hmm?" "Your feet." "What about them?" I was about to point out that resting them next to my open bowl of salted cashews was a sanitation hazard. Before the words left my mouth, she yanked her legs back in a panic, her cheeks flaming. "Do you... have some kind of fixation with feet?" I stared at her. "What?" I had zero recollection of any of those incidents. "Sloane," I interrupted calmly. "Do you know what a good engineer spends fifty percent of their life doing?" "...What?" "Pattern recognition. Every single time you become defensive or nervous, your toes curl inward. They’re doing it right now." She immediately looked down at her feet, then violently tucked both legs completely under the cashmere throw, the blush sweeping over her jawline. "I am not nervous." "Sure." "My feet are just cold." It was mid-August in New York. The central air was holding steady at seventy-four degrees. If her feet were genuinely freezing, she was biologically reptilian. "You’ve clearly never had a real girlfriend," she muttered into the collar of her sweater. "Did you use pattern recognition on that, too?" She rolled her eyes, deliberately changing the subject, and somehow circled right back to her untouchable high school crush. "Derek was just like you. Oblivious and hyper-focused." For the very first time, she unlocked her phone and showed me a photograph of Derek Shaw. The picture was recent—maybe a year or two out of college. Derek was still sporting the exact same thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses and the oversized, slightly rounded bowl cut. I had abandoned that disastrous aesthetic the summer after high school. Was this guy genuinely an intellectual heavyweight, or just cosplay-competent? "Look at him, Nate," Sloane murmured, her eyes softening with nostalgia. "Do you have any idea how brilliant he was back then? The state math olympiad—he solved the hardest proof with five separate methods. He was a complete prodigy. If he ever got into software engineering, he’d probably outperform you in a heartbeat." If she had praised his charisma or his fashion sense, I would have nodded politely and moved on. But drag my engineering domain into it? That was an unacceptable system error. "Oakridge Prep?" I asked. "Derek Shaw?" "Yes! You remember him?" "I graduated from Oakridge Prep." Sloane’s eyes instantly lit up with excitement. "Then tell me about him! I only saw him in passing back then, and we barely crossed paths after college. What else did he do? What were his legendary moments in the honors program?" I stared at her, my expression completely flat. "I don't know him. He wasn't anyone of note." "What?" "Five proofs for a basic polynomial theorem is child's play," I said coldly. "In our graduating class, there was only one undisputed math genius, and it certainly wasn't Derek Shaw. He wouldn't last five minutes against my compiler." Sloane was stunned. In the two months we had lived together, I had been unfailingly polite, patient, and restrained. She had never seen me launch an unprovoked, clinical attack on someone—least of all the boy on her pedestal. Her face flushed with indignation. "Are you out of your mind? You're being childishly arrogant! Did you think tearing down someone I admire would somehow make me look at you differently? Derek was extraordinary, whether you want to admit it or not! I’m done talking to you!" She vanished into the hallway and shut her bedroom door with enough force to rattle the crown molding. 5 After that door slammed, Sloane didn't set foot in my study for an entire week. She was genuinely furious. Every morning, when she put on her heels in the foyer, the sharp clicks of her stilettos on the marble were twice as loud as usual. She worked late at the office until ten every night, walked straight into the master suite, and didn't even bother turning on the living room sconces. Mrs. Gable mentioned that she was barely touching her meals. A bowl of slow-simmered chicken broth left on her bedside table at night would still be sitting there, stone-cold, by sunrise. Yet I hadn't lied. Back in high school, every aspiring math and science nerd in the tri-state area tried to compare notes with me. Derek Shaw wasn't in the top ten of our class. He wasn't even in the top hundred. Puzzled, I actually pulled up the archived records from that year's state tournament. I hadn't officially competed that day. I had thought the problem set was too pedestrian to bother registering for. But our AP Calculus mentor had practically begged me to travel with the team as their student captain, just so the other kids would stay calm and have someone to cross-check their solutions with in the lobby afterward. I dialed my old high school mentor that afternoon. "Mr. Harrison, do you remember a student from our year named Derek Shaw being on the olympiad roster?" "Derek Shaw?" Mr. Harrison chuckled over the line. "Good heavens, no. That year we only qualified two senior girls, and you came along as the honorary proctor and morale booster." I froze, an unsettling suspicion taking root in my mind. Wait. Had someone bumped into me in the corridor outside the examination hall ten years ago? Back then, my skull was so packed with advanced algorithmic theories that I had barely registered the collision. I had just picked up my papers and walked away without looking up. On the fourth night of our cold war, around two in the morning, while I was running a background memory leak diagnostic, the study door swung open. Sloane was standing there, wrapped in a giant ivory throw blanket, barefoot, her hair a little wild, dark circles shadowing her lower eyelids. She said nothing. She marched directly over to the lounger, sank into it, and pulled the blanket up to her chin. "What are you doing?" I asked. "The Wi-Fi signal is stronger in this room," she said, keeping her eyes firmly shut. Two in the morning. Coming into my study to 'leech the Wi-Fi' without a single electronic device in her hands. It was the worst excuse in human history, but it was her way of calling a ceasefire. She shifted in the chair, bundling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. The tips of her toes poked out from the hem of the wool—almost as if by design. Just like that, the cold war ended, and she resumed her nocturnal presence in my study. Yet a strange panic began to set in. What if she dug into the school archives? What if she figured out that the boy she had spent ten years romanticizing was actually the guy sitting across from her in sweatpants? Before our wedding, more than one family elder had pulled me aside: "Nate, don't let Sloane's fierce boardroom facade fool you. That girl has been fiercely loyal and intensely clingy since she was a child." "Whoever wins her heart will have her glued to their side for life. She won't let you out of her sight." I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. If she realized the truth, she would never leave this study. How was I supposed to write clean, uninterrupted code with her bare feet and searching eyes lingering two feet away from my keyboard? Code was the only predictable partner I needed. I resolved to keep my mouth shut, wait for Derek Shaw to show his face, hand her off to her beloved high school fantasy, and take my generous exit payout. On our seventy-sixth day together, Derek Shaw returned to the city. I only found out by pure coincidence. I had walked over to the micro-center near her corporate headquarters to pick up a specialized external GPU enclosure. As I passed the plaza in front of her office tower, I spotted the unmistakable bowl cut. Derek Shaw. He was still clinging to that ridiculous aesthetic. Right at that exact moment, Sloane stepped out of the lobby. 6 Code was definitely better than real life. Code never generated this level of suffocating awkwardness. With a single glance, I could tell Derek Shaw recognized me instantly—and he knew that I had likely seen through his decade-long charade. Sloane was walking toward us, carrying a large iced Americano. When she saw the two of us standing near the fountain, she didn't greet Derek first. Instead, her eyes locked onto me. "Nate? What are you doing over here?" I held up the branded electronics box. "Hardware run. There's a specialty tech supply shop two blocks down." Derek stepped forward, adjusting his wire frames. Sloane was about to make introductions, but Derek hastily extended a hand with an overly polished smile. "Derek Shaw. You must be Nate Campbell? I remember hearing your name back at Oakridge." I shifted the heavy enclosure to my left hand and gave him a brief, perfunctory handshake, internally shaking my head at his sheer stupidity. Man, you should have pretended you never heard of me. If you admit you know who I was, how are you going to explain the fact that you weren't the top dog? Sloane stood beside us, glancing back and forth between Derek and me, a sharp, assessing glint appearing in her hazel eyes. Derek turned to Sloane, his voice dropping into a smooth, familiar register. "It’s been so long, Sloane. Why don't we grab a coffee and catch up on the old days?" I looked at the massive sixteen-ounce iced coffee already in Sloane's hand and felt an overwhelming wave of second-hand embarrassment. This was the intellectual heavyweight she had placed on a pedestal for a decade? Furthermore, that casual "it's been so long" triggered every pattern recognition alarm in my head. Derek had been back in the country for at least forty-eight hours. Sloane hadn't gone to JFK to pick him up? Had she already started putting the pieces together? "I should get going," I offered quickly. "I have a local build compiling on the server at home." I turned to leave, but Sloane’s fingers instantly snapped around the fabric of my sleeve. "Your compilation isn't going to blow up if you pause it for an hour," she said firmly. Before I could protest, she had dragged me into the artisan café on the ground floor. The seating arrangement was orchestrated entirely by Sloane: she took the plush bench by the window, pulled me down directly beside her, and left Derek to sit awkwardly on the single armchair across the small marble table. The barista walked over with menus. I began to look down at the roast options, but Sloane reached across, plucked the menu straight from my hands, and closed it. "Steamed whole milk for him, please," she told the server. "No espresso. His stomach can't tolerate acidity." Derek’s smile tightened, a slight twitch near his jaw. "You seem to have Nate's routine down to a science, Sloane." "He lives with me," Sloane stated casually. I almost choked on my own saliva. Derek’s face went stiff. He sat there with his mouth slightly parted, scrambling for a response. "It's a temporary arrangement," I chimed in hastily, trying to diffuse the bomb she had just dropped. "I provide technical infrastructure support for her enterprise platform." Under the table, the sharp toe of Sloane’s pump slammed right down on my sneaker. Then, without missing a beat, she locked her eyes onto Derek. "Derek," she asked, her tone conversational yet dangerously sharp. "Back in senior year, during the state math competition... you didn't end up submitting your final test packet because you thought the problems were too trivial, right?" Derek had even plagiarized my exact reasoning. Sitting right across from the actual author of that excuse, Derek’s voice lost half its volume. "Well... I never liked showing off, Sloane. Why are we suddenly bringing up high school tournaments? Let’s talk about something current." 7 Sloane was not about to let the thread go. "Just curious," she continued smoothly. "Nate was at Oakridge during that exact same period. He’s exceptionally gifted with advanced mathematics. Since you were both top-tier scholars in the same building, I imagine you must have collaborated often?" The trap was so obvious that even an uncalibrated chatbot could have seen it coming. Derek pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, clearing his throat. "Of course. Nate was quite... well-known. Almost everyone in our honors track knew of him." Sloane didn't press Derek further. Instead, she slowly turned her gaze to me. "Then tell me, Nate. Why did you tell me you didn't know who he was?" From the corner of my eye, I saw Derek’s hand resting on the marble tabletop, his knuckles white as he clenched his fingers. He knew he was living on borrowed time. If I simply said, "I really don't know him," Sloane would follow the evidentiary trail and expose him on the spot. On the other hand, if I lied and said, "Oh, my mistake, I remember him now," I would be actively aiding a fraud and lying to Sloane's face. I wasn't going to compromise my integrity for this clown. "Oakridge had twelve hundred students," I said evenly. "I didn't pay attention to people." Derek visibly exhaled, seizing the opening to rebuild his facade. "Yes, well, some hyper-focused students are like that. Completely absorbed in their own narrow subjects. I always preferred a more well-rounded, holistic approach to leadership." He was actually trying to spin my introversion into his personal superiority. My fingers tightened on the edge of the table. Sloane looked at Derek, then looked at me, her eyes narrowing as if she were running a final diagnostic on two completely mismatched data sets. Just as I braced for her next cross-examination, she abruptly pushed back her chair and stood up. "Nate," she said, looking down at me with a cold, unreadable expression. "You're truly unbelievable." Dropping that single line, she turned and marched out of the café. Derek immediately scrambled to his feet and chased after her through the glass doors. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I watched as Sloane didn't even slow her stride, waving him off with a look of pure, icy contempt before stepping into a waiting black town car. The bad feeling in my chest was spreading fast. Having been thoroughly dismissed, Derek trudged back into the café, his face dark with suppressed fury. He planted himself in front of my table, glaring down at me. "What is your deal with Sloane? Even if you're doing contract work for her company, why the hell are you sleeping under her roof?" I had zero interest in wasting processing power on an insecure imposter. I drained the rest of the warm milk in one pull, grabbed my GPU box, and headed out toward the curb to hail a cab. Derek followed right behind me, his voice rising in agitation. "I don't care what game you think you're playing, Campbell! You stay away from her! Sloane has had feelings for me since we were seventeen! You might be good with numbers, but that doesn't mean you can replace me. I know exactly what she loves." "What she loves?" I couldn't help but scoff, looking at his hair. "A ten-year-old bowl cut? Aren't you sweating under that thing in August?" Derek’s face flushed purple. "Some habits are kept for the people who matter! You wouldn't understand! I'm warning you—pack your gear and get out of her penthouse. Do you hear me?" I opened the cab door and looked back at him with a faint, mocking grin. "Maybe you should go tell Sloane to stop having designs on me." 8 The ride back was entirely consumed by the memory of Sloane walking away from Derek outside the café. She hadn't looked back once. That evening, when Sloane returned home, the first thing she did was march into the study and slam a heavy ceramic mug of warm milk onto my desk. Her jaw was tight, her eyes smoldering with irritation. She didn't say a single word, her bare feet making sharp thud-thud-thud sounds against the floorboards as she stormed right back out. I stared at the mug. I liked milk, sure, but was I expected to consume it by the gallon? Thirty minutes later, the door creaked open again. Seeing the empty mug on my coaster, Sloane let out a strange, haughty little huff. Two minutes later, she marched back in and deposited a second mug of steaming milk right in front of me. My internal system was officially flashing critical warning alerts. Another half hour passed, and as predicted, the study door swung open for the third time. Before she could grab the second empty mug, I leaned back in my chair. "Sloane. Can we talk?" The storm cloud on her face fractured slightly, the corner of her mouth twitching upward in an almost imperceptible curve. "You have something you want to say to me?" "Yes." "Fine. Go ahead." She moved over to the lounger, curled her legs beneath her, and rested her heels along the wide leather armrest—pointing them directly toward my desk. My eyes flicked down, then up. "Don't look around," she said, her ears turning pink. "Say what you need to say." If you don't want me to look, maybe don't display them on the armrest. I took a steadying breath. "Derek is back in the country." "I have eyes, Nate. Tell me something I don't know." "Our postnuptial agreement stated that once he returned, we would file for an uncontested divorce. Pick a morning this week that works for your schedule, and we can head down to the municipal court to sign the dissolution papers." Sloane froze. The slight smugness on her face vanished, replaced by an absolute, rigid stillness. Slowly, she sat up straight on the lounger, her hazel eyes glistening with sudden, unmistakable moisture. "You're in that much of a hurry?" she whispered. "I... I just don't want to complicate your personal life, Ms. Sullivan." "Ms. Sullivan..." She let out a sharp, self-deprecating laugh. "You really are something else, Nate." The study fell into a suffocating, heavy silence. She stood up, her voice dropping into a flat, icy monotone. "The board is preparing for Q3 earnings. I don't have the bandwidth for court filings. We'll deal with it later. And don't flatter yourself by thinking I'm lingering because of you." She snatched the empty mug off my desk, turned toward the doorway, and threw one last bitter line over her shoulder: "Go live happily ever after with your compiler!" The divorce timeline stalled completely. A week later, the front doorbell rang. Mrs. Gable answered it. A moment later, I heard raised voices in the foyer. I walked out of the study to find Derek Shaw standing on the welcome mat, his face contorted with righteous anger. "Can I help you?" I asked. "Yeah, you can!" Derek snapped, trying to step past the threshold. "I realize you have zero self-respect, Campbell! What, can't afford rent on a developer's salary? Pack your junk and get out of Sloane's home! You are actively interfering in an established relationship—" Before he could finish his sentence, a heavy
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