Chapter 9: Slide Nine

It was raining again by the time Brogan drove me back to Cottage Grove, and neither of us had said a word since the stairwell.

He made me a grilled cheese on a hot plate in the corner of the workshop.

He cut it on the diagonal and set it down on a paper towel.

"Eat," he said.

I ate.

It was the first hot thing I'd swallowed all day, and it was very good.

"Tell me how he did it to you," I said.

Brogan sat on a stool across the bench and turned a small green circuit board over in his fingers.

"I wrote the voice code in my mother's garage. Neil was in grad school. He asked if he could show it to a professor."

"And?"

"And two years later there was a company with his name on the door and a pitch about his idea."

"Did you say anything?"

"I said it was fine." He set the board down. "Then he wanted the system to listen to the tone of people's voices and log their moods. I said no."

"Why?"

"It was a lamp for my father, Mara. It wasn't a diary somebody keeps on you."

He said it quietly, but the board rattled when he put it down.

"I wouldn't give him the next version. So he told the other founders I was in crisis. He said I'd been sleeping in the garage and hearing things."

"Were you?"

"I was sleeping in the garage because my father had just died, and it was where his lamp still worked."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband's Smart House Only Listens to Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.