Chapter 18: What I Can't Say

"I haven't seen anything," I said.

"Then how do you know?"

"I just do."

"That's not an answer, Linds. That's what people say in horoscopes."

"It's the only answer I've got."

He looked out at the water.

"Okay," he said.

He walked me the rest of the way home.

He didn't come up.

On Monday, Garner called a meeting in the lab with the door shut.

He'd written the offer on the whiteboard, under Lantern Health.

"$2,000,000. 30 days."

Under it he'd written what we had in the bank.

It was a very small number.

"I want to hear from everybody," he said. "Honestly. I'm not proud. I'll take any good argument."

The quiet server guy went first.

"I've got loans," he said. "Two million means I get paid. I vote yes."

The girl with the nose ring chewed her lip.

"If they keep us on, I'm yes," she said. "If they don't, I don't know."

Garner nodded and looked at Nolan.

Nolan was sitting on the edge of his desk, not looking at me.

"Their health company has sales people in forty states," he said. "They could get Lantern into clinics faster than we ever will."

"That's the whole point of it, right? Clinics."

"And if they shelve it?" I said.

"Then they wasted two million dollars. Nobody does that."

"Companies do that every day. They buy things so nobody else can have them."

"Do you have any evidence they'd do that?"

"No."

"Then what do you have?"

Every face in the room turned to me.

I had a voice at 11:47 at night.

His project gets bought by a tech giant in two years.

Not by a venture firm in one.

"I think it's worth a lot more," I said. "I think if we hold on, somebody much bigger comes."

"Who?" Garner asked gently.

"I don't know."

"When?"

"Soon. Within a year."

"Based on what?"

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