In Silence, I Let You Go novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Maggie's Closet

Maggie takes her in, the old laptop with the first commit comes out of the closet, and at midnight Fieldwork posts a founder video with Hannah cropped out of every shot.

Maggie opened her door in scrubs with a half-eaten bagel in her hand.

She had just come off a double shift at the hospital, and she took one look at me in a stranger's coat and put the bagel down on the floor.

"Who died?"

"Nobody," I said. "Tim got married."

"To who?"

"Sienna. From his office. She's pregnant. He said it at the party, in front of everyone."

Maggie looked past me at the tall man on the landing holding my box.

"Is he the one who did it?"

"No," Colter said. "I'm the one who drove her."

"Then you can put that down and go."

He set the box inside the door, took a card from his wallet, and held it out to me.

"My cell is on the back," he said. "The board meets Friday. Come as my guest."

"Why?"

"Because the board should hear what happened from someone who was there, and I'd rather it was you."

He left before I could answer.

Maggie shut the door and turned all three locks, which she only did when she was angry.

Then she hugged me so hard my ribs creaked, and I stood there with my arms at my sides until they remembered how to move.

"I'm going to kill him," she said into my hair. "I'm going to kill him with a bedpan. I have access to a lot of bedpans."

"Please don't."

"I'm going to key his car."

"He leases it."

"I'm going to key it anyway."

She made me tea and put a blanket on my shoulders and a sleeve of crackers in my hands, and she walked in circles around her tiny kitchen while I told her all of it.

The game.

The glass.

The key card that blinked red.

Then the phone call, which made Maggie put down her mug and say a word I will not repeat.

When I finished she stopped walking.

"Okay," she said. "You post it. Right now. You put the video of the party everywhere, you tag the company, you tag the stock, you tell every nurse who uses that app what kind of man runs it."

"No."

"Han."

"If I post it, I'm the woman who screamed on the internet," I said. "That's the story he wants. A woman who lost her mind in the middle of his big night."

"So you do nothing?"

"I don't say anything. Not online and not to him. Not one word until I know exactly what I'm holding."

I surprised myself with how calm I sounded.

On the roof I had not said a word, and every person there had watched me not say it.

I could still feel how that silence had landed on them.

Maggie sat down across from me and studied my face.

"All right," she said slowly. "What are you holding?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then let's find out."

She went to the hall closet and came back with a silver laptop in her arms, its lid scratched, a faded sticker of a cartoon cloud on the corner.

I had left it with her four years ago, the week I moved in with Tim, and told her to throw it out.

She never did.

"You wrote the whole first version on this thing," she said. "In my spare room. You ate my yogurt for a year."

"It was a good yogurt."

I plugged it in, and it groaned and then lit up.

The password was the name of my dead cat.

The first project folder was still there.

I opened the history and scrolled back to the bottom, to the first line anyone had ever saved.

March 2016, 2:14 in the morning.

My own words, typed when I was barely out of college, sat at the top of the file.

# v0. If this works, Tim will say he thought of it.

I read it twice.

Maggie read it over my shoulder and made a sound I had never heard from her.

"You knew," she said.

"I was joking."

"You were twenty-one, and you were joking, and you were right."

Eleven hundred and thirty-one commits sat below that line, every one with my name on it and a timestamp.

No press release could erase them.

I took a breath and closed the laptop.

It was almost midnight.

Maggie's phone buzzed on the counter, and then mine did, and then hers again.

She picked it up first.

"Oh, you son of a bitch," she said.

Fieldwork's official account had posted a video called Our Founder Story.

She turned the screen toward me.

It opened on the framed photo from the garage, the same photo I had pulled out of a dumpster four hours before.

The picture had been cropped.

Tim stood alone at the folding table with his router, grinning, and the left half of the frame was gone.

Under it, in clean white type, the caption read: Built from nothing by one man.

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