Divorce and Rise to My Pinnacle novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Harbor Line

Nathan Strand offers a fair price for her code; her accounts freeze and Kendra answers the lake house door in Odessa's robe.

I did not take the chain off.

"You're the competition," I said.

"Technically, yes." Nathan Strand stood up slowly, like a man whose knees had been on too many docks. "Tonight I'm just a fan."

"A fan of what?"

"Of whoever wrote the Hale routing engine."

He glanced at the dead hallway light.

"I saw it work once, in 2023, on a subcontract. It rerouted forty trucks around a bridge collapse in nine minutes."

"Eleven," I said.

He smiled. "See, that's the kind of correction I've been paying lawyers to find."

I weighed him through the gap in the door.

He was tall, with dark hair, rough hands, and a face that listened more than it talked.

Everything about him said he had started at the bottom and hated being reminded.

"How did you find me tonight?" I asked.

"Your husband's lawyer filed a notice at 9 p.m.

"A friend at the clerk's office said the license holder was an LLC on Milwaukee Avenue."

He shrugged.

"I took a chance."

"You waited on my stairs for three hours."

"Two. I had a sandwich."

Against my will, I almost smiled.

I took the chain off.

"Five minutes," I said.

He sat at my father's drafting table without being asked and looked around the room with open respect.

He saw the slide rule, the old blueprints, and the framed photo of my father with a wrench in his hand.

"That is your father," he said. "He fixed my first truck for free."

I stopped with the kettle in my hand.

"Everyone says that," I said. "He fixed half of Chicago for free."

"I was nineteen and broke. He told me to pay him back by never overcharging a driver."

Nathan's voice was easy, but it did not joke.

"I never have."

I poured two cups of tea, because I was my father's daughter.

"Ms. Hale, I'll be direct. My company is losing contracts to a system that is better than anything I can build. I want that system."

"You want to buy it."

"I want to license it, at a price that doesn't insult you. Three million a year, for a start. And your name on it."

My hand tightened on the cup.

"Three million," I repeated.

"Pinnacle pays you a dollar."

"You know that?"

"I know a great many things about a company I've been losing to for ten years."

I looked at him for a long moment.

No one had ever offered me my own name before.

"Not yet," I said.

His eyebrows went up. "I'm not even high-balling."

"I know. That is why I'm saying not yet."

"What are you waiting for?"

I thought about Bryce's voice at the door.

I thought about Kendra's gold pen and Marjorie's wine glass lifted high.

"Tonight he told his board I contributed nothing,"

I said.

"I want him to say it again in front of them, with his trucks standing still.

"And I want him to ask me for the license while they listen."

Nathan did not smile this time.

He studied my face, and something shifted in his.

"That's cold," he said quietly.

"It's patient."

"It's also the first plan I've heard that I would pay to watch."

"You're not paying," I said. "You're waiting."

He laughed then, low and surprised, and it filled the cold little room.

It was a good laugh.

I noticed it, and I did not like that I noticed.

He finished his tea, stood, and left a card on the table beside the first one.

"Private number," he said. "If anything goes wrong tonight, call before you sleep."

"Nothing will go wrong."

"Then call after you win."

He was gone before I could answer, and I stood listening to his footsteps on the stairs.

My phone buzzed.

It was my bank, and the message was one line.

"Your joint account ending 4471 has been frozen by court order."

I checked my father's account, the real one, the one I had moved in March.

The money was safe.

But the frozen account was where my car payments and groceries came from, and Marjorie had known that.

She wanted me to feel it.

I didn't answer the message.

I slept in my father's narrow bed, in my clothes, and woke at dawn to my own alarm.

By nine o'clock I was driving north toward Harbor Springs.

I wanted my winter coat and my mother's recipe box out of the lake house before anyone took them.

The house stood on a bluff above the water, white clapboard with a green door.

My father had left it to me the year he died.

Bryce called it "our getaway," and used it twice a summer.

I turned in at the gravel drive and saw a red convertible parked beside my porch.

It was not Bryce's car.

My key card didn't work on the front door.

I knocked, and after a long minute the green door swung open.

Kendra Voss stood there in my bathrobe, the blue one with the torn pocket that my mother had sewn.

She had coffee in my mug and a smile on her face.

"Oh good," she said. "You're early."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

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