He Married His Hometown Neighbor, Then Begged for a Second Chance novel · Chapter 31 of 40

Chapter 31: Partners

Ethan came to the room above the bakery on the Friday at six, with no flowers and no contract.

He had a laptop bag, and a paper sack of bread from downstairs.

The tall engineer took one look at the sack and said, "Are you the investor?"

"I'm an investor."

"Then you can carry the folding chairs."

Ethan carried the folding chairs.

For two hours he sat at the end of a long table with a notebook, and listened to a lab argue.

He asked a dozen questions.

Evan, at the whiteboard, watched him ask them.

They were not a chairman's questions.

They were small and exact, about the order in which things happened, and what would break if one of them did not.

At the third he stopped, and drew a line on the board with Evan's marker, and said, "If the second node goes down before the check, the freeze never fires."

The boy with the notebook looked up.

"That's the bug we found yesterday."

"I know," said Ethan. "I read it in the code. Ross built the same mistake into a module in March, and nobody saw it for months."

He looked at Evan.

"You'd have seen it in a day."

Evan turned back to the board, to hide the heat in his face.

At nine the engineers went home with the bread.

The room was suddenly quiet, with the radiator ticking.

"Dinner's at the flat," Evan said. "I said it was business."

"You said it was a lie."

"I said I'd call it business."

Fourteen C had one pot on the stove and a table for two.

It was Gran's stew, from the recipe that lived in his head.

He ladled it into two bowls, and Ethan ate the first in silence, and held out his hand for the second without a word.

"You've done this before," Evan said.

"In my own kitchen. You were across the island."

"I remember."

"I've thought about that bowl more than I've thought about any quarterly report."

Evan laughed.

It came up out of him before he could stop it.

He cleared the plates and stood at the sink with his back to the room.

He was holding the soapy bowl when he decided.

He dried his hands.

He went to the pocket of the coat he'd hung on the chair, and took out the battered phone.

It had a cracked corner and a strip of tape on the back.

He put it on the table between the empty bowls.

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