You Fired a Tech Genius novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: Her Question

I didn't go to Gilbert.

I stood on the sidewalk outside the steakhouse for a full minute with his words in my ears.

Then I got in a cab and gave the driver Zoe's address.

Halfway there I changed it to mine.

She was waiting on my stoop in Logan Square, in her camel coat, with a paper bag of burgers.

"Bridger told me where you live," she said. "He also told me you'd walk out of the dinner hungry."

"You asked him."

"I asked him two hours ago," Zoe said. "I'm not slow."

My apartment was one room and a half, with a mattress on a frame, forty-one books and a window onto a fire escape.

She looked at it carefully while I took the burgers to the counter.

"You make a lot of money," she said. "You live like a monk."

"I was busy."

"Doing what?"

"Making someone else's company run."

We ate sitting on the floor with our backs against the bed.

She took her shoes off, and I noticed again how she pulled her feet up under her.

"The chair said something today," I said, wiping my hands. "That you had one reason for hiring me, and it wasn't the only one."

Zoe stopped chewing.

"No lies," I said. "Your rule."

"It is," she said. "So I won't tell you one."

"You won't?"

"I have another reason, Axel. It's real, and it's mine."

She set the burger down.

"I will tell you all of it after the Summit."

"Why after?"

"Because if I tell you tonight, you'll stop looking at me like this."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm someone you chose," Zoe said.

The room was quiet.

I thought of Gilbert's voice at the bar and the mirror behind the bottles.

I could have said, he told me to come hear it from him.

"Okay," I said.

She blinked.

"Okay?"

"You said you'll tell me. That's not a lie."

"That's the strangest thing anyone has ever said to me," Zoe said softly.

"I'm a strange guy."

She smiled, a small private one, and then she put her hand flat on my chest.

"Ask me something else," she said. "A real question."

I thought.

"Ask me why I turned your recruiters down four times," I said. "Even the muffin basket."

"Why did you?"

"I was twenty-two when I started at Hallett," I said. "My father had been dead three months."

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