My husband divorced me on national TV. He didn't know he just fired the genius behind his entire empire. novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: The Rival's Desk
Nolan Stroud did not take her to a restaurant.
He met her at seven in the morning in the kitchen of Stroud Labs, a bare loft floor with forty desks and one coffee machine, and he handed her a paper bag with two bagels in it.
"I know you won't want to be seen with me," he said. "So we're not."
Dani sat on a stool and did not open the bag.
He was tall and dark-haired, with his sleeves rolled up and gray eyes that rested on her and did not wander.
Preston's eyes always wandered, looking for a better room.
"Everyone wants Beacon," she said. "Preston wants it. His investors want it. You run the only company that competes with it. Say the real thing."
"All right." Nolan leaned against the counter. "I don't want Beacon."
"That's a bad opening."
"It's a true one. Beacon is six years old. I want to see what you build next."
Dani studied him.
"Why would you care?"
"My engineers read your commit log all night." He folded his arms. "Every one of your files ends with a blank line and a comment that says, ok, go."
She went still.
"Preston never wrote a comment in his life," Nolan said. "He wrote an apology to the board once and it had a typo. But your files all end the same way. It took us until three in the morning to notice and nobody went home."
"Anyone could copy that."
"Then test me."
Dani set down the bagel.
"Module nine. The freight retry. There's a delay in it that looks like a bug."
"It isn't one." He answered at once. "It's two hundred and fifty milliseconds. The Midwest carrier's interface drops packets on the first try, so you wait a quarter second and ask again. You left yourself a note about it. 'Don't fix this, it's a carrier problem.'"
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