From Secret Desire for My Stepbrother to Reality novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Clean Room

By eight, Kath was back from Shoreline with a pot roast in a cooler and the complaint printed out.

She read it to us at the front counter.

Hush said Both was "derived from proprietary matching systems authored during the defendant's employment."

Hush said every line of code on my door desk was theirs.

Hush wanted a judge to stop me before I shipped a single thing.

"It's not true," the apprentice said.

"It doesn't have to be true," I said. "It just has to be hard to prove it isn't."

I looked at the door desk in the corner of the workshop.

Ten days of my work sat on that borrowed laptop.

I'd written every line of it myself.

I'd also written Hush's engine myself, at twenty-three, on my old couch.

The same hands.

The same habits.

Some of the same mistakes.

The chair's voice came back to me from the ferry. In daylight. Where they can watch every step.

"Kath," I said. "Can you get the ring light?"

She went still.

"Lindy. What are you doing?"

"Something stupid."

We set it up at the door desk.

Jem's phone on the phone books.

The laptop open, the folder of my ten days on the screen.

I hit live.

Thirty thousand people came in the first minute.

"Good morning," I said. "Hush says I stole the code for Both. So here's the code for Both."

I scrolled through the folder slowly, so everyone could see it.

Then I selected all of it.

Kath made a noise.

"Lindy, there are backups of that in..."

"Not anymore."

I deleted it.

I opened a new file.

It was white and empty, with one blinking line at the top.

"This is Both," I said. "Day one. Nothing in it. Every line I write from now on, you'll see me write. I'll explain every one. If anybody ever says it came from Hush, you'll have the tape."

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