My husband divorced me on national TV. He didn't know he just fired the genius behind his entire empire. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Night Shift

Glenn and two engineers bring pizza and the first commit, and a one-page license from a freezer tin turns out to say Dani is owed 2% of every Beacon dollar since 9:58 that morning. A man in a gray suit has already visited her mother, and Nolan Stroud calls.

Glenn Dugan showed up at the motel at midnight with two pizzas and two engineers.

One wore a Seahawks beanie.

The other never took her headphones off, even to say hello.

"Night shift," Glenn said, and kicked the door open with his foot. "They were the only ones willing to quit with me."

"Nobody quit," said the beanie.

"Yet," said the headphones.

Dani laughed for the first time all day.

They sat in a row on the brown blanket with the boxes open between them.

Glenn opened his laptop and turned it so she could see.

"Preston's lawyers ordered the repository deleted at 5:15," he said. "I copied it at 5:14."

"Glenn."

"I have a very good sense of timing when I'm scared."

On the screen was a list of commits, six years deep.

The very first was at the bottom.

Initial commit. Author: Dani Kehoe. Message: it runs.

Dani looked at that line for a long moment.

She had been twenty-two, living on instant noodles, writing it on a secondhand laptop that overheated if she looked at it wrong.

"He told the whole country you never wrote a line," Glenn said. His voice shook. "I will bury him with this."

"Not yet."

"Dani."

"If you show it now, his lawyers call it stolen, and you're the thief." She pushed a slice of pizza toward him. "I need something he can't call a fake."

"What is that?"

She stopped with her hand on the box.

There was something.

It had been tucked in the back of her mind for six years, a single page she had signed in a hurry when she was twenty-two and Halloway Systems was three weeks from dying.

She took out her phone, then remembered the company phone was in the bottom of the backpack, turned off, and borrowed Glenn's.

Her mother answered on the fourth ring.

"Baby? It's after midnight. Did something happen?"

"Mom, I need you to do something strange. Go to the freezer."

"The freezer."

"Under the venison. There's a cookie tin."

There was a long pause, and the sound of a trailer door, and the heavy clunk of a freezer lid.

"Okay," her mother said. "It's here. It's got frost on it."

"Open it and read me the page on top. The one with Harold Halloway's signature on it."

Paper crackled.

Her mother read slowly.

"'Beacon shall appear on every screen of the licensed product as Beacon, by Dani Kehoe.'"

Glenn stopped chewing.

"'The licensee shall pay the author two percent of net revenue. The payment is waived for as long as the author is married to the licensee's chief executive.'"

The headphones had come off.

"'If the credit is removed, this license ends thirty days after written notice.'"

Her mother stopped.

"That's all of it, baby. Why did you give me this to keep?"

"Because you told me never to sign anything forever," Dani said.

"I said that to you about a car loan."

"It worked on this too."

Nobody said anything.

Then Dani looked at Glenn.

"What time did Preston's lawyers file?"

"9:58," Glenn said slowly. "It's in the news."

"At 9:58 this morning I stopped being married to the CEO."

Glenn opened a calculator on his laptop.

His fingers were not steady.

"Beacon did one point one billion in revenue last year. Two percent of that is..."

"Twenty-two million a year," the beanie said, quietly.

Glenn choked on his pizza.

The beanie slapped his back.

"I've been owed that," Dani said, "since a minute before ten."

"He took your name off the splash screen," Glenn whispered. "Three years ago. I remember the day he did it."

"I remember it too."

She had watched the new screen go up and told herself it didn't matter.

It mattered.

"Mom," she said into the phone. "Is the tin the only copy?"

"There's the original, I think. Mr. Halloway kept it."

"Okay. Okay."

There was a hesitation on the line.

"Baby, there's something else. A man came by this evening. Around six."

Dani's whole body went still.

"What kind of man?"

"Gray suit. Nice shoes, ugly in the mud. He said he was from your husband's company and he was collecting some papers you left in my care." Her mother snorted. "I told him I burned every paper you ever gave me. He looked like he'd swallowed a bee."

"And then?"

"And then I put the tin in the freezer and I locked the freezer with a bike lock, and I watched him leave." A pause. "Was that wrong?"

Dani pressed her fist against her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

"No, Mom. That was perfect."

She was still smiling when Glenn's phone buzzed in her hand.

An unknown number.

She almost let it ring.

Then she answered.

"Dani Kehoe?" The voice was low, calm and dry. "My name is Nolan Stroud."

Glenn dropped his slice of pizza on the blanket.

"I run Stroud Labs. I watched the interview too." A short pause. "I'd like to buy you breakfast. I'm not buying anything else."

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