You Fired a Tech Genius novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Chairman's Kitchen

The nurse let me in without a word and went upstairs.

Gilbert Hallett was in the kitchen of the Lincoln Park brownstone, at the small table where he used to eat soup on Sundays, in his cardigan with a blanket over his knees.

A kettle was ticking on the stove.

He had already set out two cups.

"You came alone," he said.

"You asked me to."

"I asked you yesterday."

"I had somewhere to be."

He nodded slowly, as if that was fair.

I didn't sit.

"I heard about the Summit," Gilbert said. "My son's assistant called me crying."

"Was she crying about him?"

"She was crying about me, I think."

He turned his cup a quarter turn on its saucer.

"Say it, Gilbert," I said. "I've been remembering your voice since two o'clock."

"Then you remember."

"Hold the Kostas batch. Just tonight. Don't write it down."

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them he looked every day of sixty-seven, and the fear in them was old.

"Tell me it was an accident," I said. "Tell me a bug did it."

"It was no bug."

"Then tell me why."

He took a breath that rattled.

"November of 2019," Gilbert said. "A bank pulled a line of credit on a Friday afternoon without warning. I had nine hundred people on payroll and eleven days of cash."

"So you used the float."

"The merchants' money sits with us for a day or two before it moves. It always has."

"It isn't yours."

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