My husband divorced me on national TV. He didn't know he just fired the genius behind his entire empire. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sign Here
On the morning of the divorce Dani remembers how she died last time, signs the papers without a tear, and watches Preston say on live TV that she never wrote a line. Glenn slides into her booth: forty-one engineers have the first commit.
Preston Halloway wanted the divorce filed before ten.
He stood at the foot of the bed in a charcoal suit and held out the papers.
"My interview goes live at five," he said. "Investors like a single CEO. Sign, and my lawyers walk it to the courthouse."
Dani Kehoe, still Dani Halloway for another few minutes, sat up in the silk sheets.
Her heart was slamming against her ribs.
She knew this room, this carpet, this exact crease in his sleeve.
She had knelt on that carpet once and begged.
That was in the other life.
In that life she had promised to be smaller, to need less, to work nights for free.
He had left anyway.
Fourteen months later she died in a hospital bed with a clot in her lung and his company's code still running in her head.
Through the wall, Preston had told a room of reporters how much he had loved her.
She pressed two fingers to the pulse in her wrist.
She was alive, and it was this morning again.
"You came here with a laptop and a backpack," Preston said. "You leave with the same. The penthouse is the company's. So are the cars."
"I never wanted the cars," Dani said.
"Good. And don't cry, please. Tatum has a courier waiting downstairs."
Dani laughed.
It came out short and dry, and it surprised both of them.
Preston's head snapped toward her. "What's funny?"
"You expected me to cry." She flipped to the property page. "Does your legal team know what this line means?"
She tapped it.
Each party keeps what they owned before the marriage.
"It means you keep a laptop and a library card," Preston said.
"Then it's an easy deal."
He studied her face, looking for the number that was wrong.
"Don't get clever, Dani. You're a kid from the lots wearing my money like a costume. We both know it never fit."
It stung.
She let it.
Then she reached for the Montblanc on the nightstand, the one he always said was too heavy for her hand.
It felt exactly right.
She signed, Dani Kehoe, in the sharp, quick hand she had used before she ever met him.
She capped the pen and dropped it in the water glass.
Preston stared at the signature.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"No speech? No begging?" His voice sharpened. "What are you planning?"
"I'm planning to be somewhere else by noon," Dani said.
The front door opened before he could answer.
A woman's heels clicked across the marble, easy and quick, and Tatum Kensley appeared in the bedroom doorway in a camel coat with two paper cups in her hands.
She was Preston's chief of communications, thirty, honey-haired, and the kind of person who remembered your coffee order.
"Oat milk, extra hot," Tatum said, and put one cup in Dani's hand.
"Thank you," Dani said, because she had always said thank you to Tatum.
Tatum had let herself in with her own key.
Dani noticed that, and then she let it go.
The comms team had always come and gone for photo shoots.
Tatum gathered the signed pages and squared the edges against her chest.
"You're a legend for handling this so gracefully," she said, softly, so Preston would not hear.
Then she was gone, and so were the papers.
Preston straightened his cuffs in the mirror.
"Be out by noon," he said. "Take only your own things."
He did not look back at her.
He never had.
Dani waited until the elevator chimed down the hall.
Then she opened the closet and pulled out the old gray backpack she had carried on her first day at his company.
She put in her laptop, a charger, her grandmother's watch and a pair of jeans.
She did not touch the silk nightgown on the floor.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
The sender was Halcyon, the stranger who had answered her messages at three in the morning for three years, and had never once asked for her name.
Whatever today is, run the tests twice.
In the other life she had never opened that message.
She had been dead by the time it would have mattered.
Dani read it again.
Then she pulled the backpack onto her shoulder.
So she walked out of the penthouse, and she did not look back.
At five that afternoon she was in a diner two blocks from the Halloway tower, eating fries at the counter in a gray hoodie.
The TV above the pie case was tuned to Market Desk, and Preston filled the screen in a fresh suit.
"We filed this morning at 9:58," he told the anchor, with a small, brave smile. "Dani was a lovely woman. She kept our home."
"And the company?" the anchor asked.
"I built Beacon alone, in a garage. Dani never wrote a line of it."
The waitress topping off Dani's coffee clicked her tongue. "Poor girl. Imagine being married to a man like that."
"Imagine," Dani said.
She did not look away from the screen.
A man in a rumpled hoodie slid into the booth behind her, breathing hard, and leaned over the back of the seat.
It was Glenn Dugan, Halloway's lead engineer, with his badge still swinging around his neck.
"Dani," he whispered. "The whole engineering floor just watched that."
"And?"
"And forty-one people stopped typing at the same moment." He held up his phone. The company chat was one long scroll of the same message. "They're saying one thing. Show him the first commit."
He swallowed.
"Dani, I still have the first commit."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend