Forgotten Groom in the Back Alley novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Resignation

The company presentation of the Harbor routing system had been pushed to Tuesday, and Brodie was giving it to our team first.

I walked into the eleventh-floor conference room at five to nine, in my gray suit, with an envelope in my jacket.

Eight engineers sat around the long table, and Brodie stood at the head of it with the deck already on the screen.

He saw me and stopped talking.

"Jude. You were put on leave."

"It was lifted yesterday. Check your email."

Brodie looked at the screen again, then at the room.

"Take a seat. We'll start in a moment."

"I'll stand."

He kept his voice friendly, for the room's sake.

"Fine. As I was saying, the Harbor system was a team effort, but the architecture came together under my direction, and so I'll walk you through the second slide."

I looked at the slide.

Lead architect, Brodie Kohler.

There was a hush in the room that I recognised.

It was the same quiet as the ballroom, with the same phones in the same hands, and half a dozen faces looking at their laps.

"Brodie," I said.

"Not now."

"The routing system on that slide is mine."

"Jude."

"I built it between the first of October and the following March, three winters running, at my kitchen table." I took the envelope out of my jacket. "Every commit has my name on it, and every one is in the repository with a date. It's all there for anybody who wants to look."

Somebody at the far end of the table put down a pen.

"This is not the time," Brodie said, quietly now.

"It's the time you picked, when you put it on a slide."

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