Divorce and Rise to My Pinnacle novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Midnight

Pinnacle's dispatch system dies at midnight; Bryce pounds on her door at 2 a.m.; a stranger waits on her stairs.

My father's flat sat above a hardware store on Milwaukee Avenue.

Two rooms, a radiator that knocked, and a window that looked out over the El tracks.

My father had lived there for thirty years, and the lease had been in my name since the funeral.

I had paid the rent every month for six years and never told Bryce.

He thought I spent Tuesdays at a book club.

I put my laptop on my father's drafting table and watched the clock.

At 11:58 I opened the Pinnacle dispatch dashboard one last time as an ordinary user.

Four hundred and twelve trucks moved across the map in small green dots.

I had drawn that map when I was twenty-three, with a cold pizza on my knees and Bryce asleep on the couch.

At 12:00 the dots froze.

A gray box opened in the middle of the screen.

"License expired. Contact the licensor, Hale Route Systems LLC, to renew."

My name was not on it, only the company's.

Bryce had never once asked what Hale Route Systems was.

I closed the laptop and made tea.

My phone started to shake on the table at 12:07.

Bryce called, then Kendra, then Bryce again.

By one o'clock there were forty-one missed calls and a text from an unknown number: "Dispatch is down. Fix it NOW."

I did not answer, and I drank my tea.

At 1:50 a.m. someone began pounding on the street door downstairs.

Then the stairs, then my door.

"Odessa!" Bryce shouted. "I know you're in there, your car's outside!"

I walked to the door and did not open it.

"Go home, Bryce."

"Open the door."

"No."

"The whole system's down! Four hundred drivers are stuck at docks and the Walgreens contract has a penalty clause!"

"Then you should call the vendor," I said.

"What vendor? It's your fault, this is sabotage, you did something to our servers!"

"I didn't touch your servers. The license expired."

There was a silence.

I could hear him breathing hard through the wood.

"What license?"

I almost laughed.

Eight years, and he had never asked what he was driving.

"Page one of the contract you signed in 2016," I said. "Annual term, thirty days notice to end it. I gave notice in May."

"You can't do that."

"I just did."

His voice changed then.

It dropped, soft and sweet, the voice he used on investors who were about to say no.

"Dessie. Honey. Come on. I was wrong tonight, I let Mom push me, I'll tear up the papers."

"You didn't let anyone push you. You had Kendra buy a gold pen."

"That's not fair."

"Are you still sleeping with her?"

He did not answer fast enough.

"I'll take that as a yes," I said.

The sweetness vanished.

"You think you're so smart," he said. "You are nothing without me. You were a girl with a laptop in a rented room."

"I was a girl with a laptop who built your company."

"You were my wife."

"I signed a paper tonight that says I contributed nothing," I said. "You told everyone I signed freely. Four people were still in the room."

"I'll sue you for every cent."

"For what? Your own license?"

He kicked the door.

It was one hard blow, and the whole frame shook, and a little plaster fell from the ceiling onto my father's drafting table.

I stepped back and picked up my phone.

"If you kick it again, I will call the police and tell them you are trying to break into my home."

"It's our home."

"It's my father's flat," I said. "It was never yours."

For a long moment nothing happened.

Then I heard his heavy shoes go back down the stairs.

The street door slammed so hard the hardware sign rattled below.

I stood still until my pulse came down.

Then I looked through the peephole to make sure the landing was empty.

It wasn't.

A man sat on the top step, leaning against the wall, with his long legs stretched across the stairs.

He wore a rumpled gray suit and no tie.

He had been there long enough to have heard everything.

I opened the door a crack, with the chain on.

He looked up and smiled, a slow tired smile with a scar on the chin.

"Ms. Hale," he said. "Sorry about the hour."

"Who are you?"

"Nathan Strand, Harbor Line Freight." He held up a business card between two fingers. "I've been trying to find you for three years."

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