The Billionaire Janitor Is Back! novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Everything

He told me everything that night, sitting on the floor of my bedroom with his back against the bed.

I sat across from him with my knees up, in the old gray sweater, and I did not interrupt.

"My name is Malachi Thorsby," he said. "I was born in Dayton, Ohio. My mother was a school custodian. I never knew my father."

"I know."

"I'm going to say all of it anyway."

I closed my mouth.

"I built my first guidance chip in a garage when I was twenty-three," he said. "At twenty-six I had a company. By thirty-five I had two thousand employees and a contract with every government that could afford me."

He turned his scarred hand over on his knee.

"I got this at twenty-nine, when a test chamber caught fire."

"I pulled a man out, and it cost me the skin on my hand."

"I thought that was the worst day of my life for fourteen years."

"And then?"

"Then my mother had a stroke."

The room was very still.

"I was in Singapore, signing the sale of the company."

"Seven point four billion dollars, a hundred and forty pages."

"The call came when I was on page ninety."

His voice stayed flat and careful.

"I finished signing. It took eleven more minutes. I told myself she'd wait."

"Mal."

"She didn't. I landed in Dayton nineteen hours later. She was gone at four in the morning, and I got there at eleven."

I moved across the carpet on my knees.

I did not say I was sorry, because it was the wrong size.

I just took his scarred hand in both of mine.

"I walked away from everything that spring," he said. "I gave my board my proxy, and I got in a truck. I drove until I found a school with a cafeteria that smelled like the one she cleaned."

"Lindenmere."

"The old Head hired me on a handshake, with no papers."

"I wanted a building I could take care of at night, where no one would ask what I'd done."

He lifted his eyes.

"And then you came down the hall one Friday with a stack of paper."

"You stopped to move a wet floor sign for me, so I wouldn't have to bend."

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