He Married His Hometown Neighbor, Then Begged for a Second Chance novel · Chapter 28 of 40

Chapter 28: The Café

By seven in the morning the photograph had been shared four hundred thousand times.

Evan stood at the window of 14C with his phone, and read the caption for the third time.

*Hours after signing divorce papers, Ross Group chairman Ethan Ross meets his ex-husband in secret. Sources say the chairman's recent hospital stay was staged, and that Ross money is already paying for Shieldon's top engineer to leave.*

The picture was well made.

It showed two men at a corner table, one leaning toward the other, with an envelope between them.

Ethan's hand was flat on the cloth, very near Evan's.

In the photograph it looked like the moment before a touch.

It had been one, almost, and the lens had caught it.

Somebody knocked at the door.

He opened it on three people with cardboard boxes.

The tall engineer with the shaved head stood in front, with a plant under one arm.

It was the fig from Evan's old office.

"We quit," he said.

"Why?"

"Because she called an all-hands at six and told us you'd sold us out to Ross." He shifted the box. "Then she told us we'd all be asked to sign a paper saying we'd never speak to you."

"I'm sorry. Don't do this for me."

"I'm not. I'm doing it for the work." The engineer set the plant on the floor and looked at him with a flat, steady gaze. "I did eight years of other people's firewalls before you. Yours is the first one I wanted to see finished."

The woman behind him, who ran the lab's night shift, nodded.

The third, a boy of twenty-three with a notebook, said nothing, and held his box very tight.

"I haven't got an office," Evan said.

"We found one."

It was above a bakery on Harbor Row, two minutes' walk away: one long room with a sloped ceiling, a sink, four folding tables and a radiator that knocked.

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