“I’m sorry,” Landon says after a moment. “But I hate the asshole. He hurt you, and you didn’t deserve it. And he is a competitor.”
I didn’t realize Jim had gotten up until he placed a box of tissues beside us. It takes a few moments before Claire notices it’s there.
She blows her nose and wipes her eyes. “Please investigate Transitive. We’re in a race to release direct translation.”
Jim nods.
“We’ve removed the spyware,” Gage explains. “And your computer and phones are clean. As far as your computer, Tinsley, we’ve learned that currently, with the reboot issue, they’re not getting the coding information, from what we can tell. The lag caused the information being captured by the spyware to spin in the router, so it was unable to send it to the thief.”
Gage is watching me carefully. I’m not going to cry. Not yet.
“We’ll check the office router and Landon’s home router for spyware. We focused just on Tinsley’s computer before, because she was the only one having issues. But I believe there may be spyware on the office router, which would transmit to whoever is behind this breach.”
“I’m curious. Would it have transmitted the code after I worked at Landon’s if I’d reconnected to the office network?” I ask.
“We need to figure that out,” Gage replies.
I’m almost shaking with rage. This is my hard work. If someone else takes it to market before I do, everything I did was for nothing. Zilch. I’m so grateful for the incredibly annoying black screen of death. It seems to be the only thing saving me right now.
Landon turns to Gage. “I’ll take you into the office and The Adams. I doubt they’ve bugged us, but I think we should check for that too.”
“What should Tinsley and I do?” Claire asks.
“The sun is shining for a change,” Jim says. “There’s a great garden on the roof. Why don’t the two of you get some vitamin D, and we’ll get lunch ordered before too long.”
He leads us to the elevator and up to the top floor, which is obviously his apartment.
I stop and stare. “This is beautiful.”
“My fiancée, Kate, did most of the decorating.”
“You’ll love Kate,” Claire says, but without much enthusiasm. “She runs a national nonprofit affiliated with Bullseye’s foundation. We’ll participate in some of their projects as a company so you’ll get the chance to work with her.”
I nod. Jim having a life outside of his work is a little surprising. He seems like a guy who splits his time between work and the gym.
Jim shows us where to go before he disappears back downstairs. We walk to a set of stairs, which takes us up to the roof. There’s a well-manicured yard with a picnic area, swing set, trees, a small pond, and when you look closely, a solid glass fence around the edge to prevent anyone from stepping over, but without obstructing the view.
We walk along a path to the pond and a bench without saying a word. Claire periodically sniffs and sniffles.
She sits down, and I sit next to her. “Do you want to talk about Morgan Bennett?”
She snorts. “The man ripped my heart out, slammed it against the wall, and then stomped all over it.”
I wince. We’ve all had someone do that to us at one point, and it changes you. I watch a mama duck come out and look at us before she gets into the pond with three ducklings behind her.
“I met him after Landon and I sold our video-conferencing company to Tom Sutterland at PeopleMover. It allowed them to do video chats on social media. It was huge. Morgan worked as the head of technology at PeopleMover and did well when they went public. He’s beautiful. Everyone stops talking and stares when he walks into a room. I couldn’t believe he talked to me.”
She wipes a tear away. “We got serious quickly. We talked about everything—our future, kids, where we’d live and vacation. We met each other’s families, and we spent as much time together as we could. Then one day, he just ghosted me.”
“Ghosted you?”
“Yep. He wouldn’t return my calls, texts, or emails. I’d sold my apartment and had movers coming to move me into his place.”
“He never told you not to move in?”
She shakes her head. “Landon took the key I had to his place and went to talk to him, but the locks had been changed.”
“Jeez. That’s harsh.”
Claire starts crying all over again, and I’m a moron. Nice going. Rub a little more salt in her wound.
“Landon was great and made sure my belongings went into storage. I lived in his guest room, and I had to explain to everyone, even people I didn’t know, what happened. It was awful.”
“He’s the ass, not you.”
“A while after that, I was out with Caroline and a few other friends, and we saw him. I confronted him about ghosting me, and he was with a date. He told me he’d never loved me.”
“That’s horrible. I hate him for you.”
“I didn’t get out of bed for a week. Landon was ready to punch his lights out.”
I giggle. “I can totally see him doing that.”
“I know.” She smiles, and I know she’s going to be okay. “Eventually I found the house on Lombard, and renovating has been a great distraction outside of work. And I knew we wanted the next evolution of our communication technology to come with translation, so I found you.”
“So, Morgan’s working on his own now? Not at PeopleMover?”
“Yeah, Landon had lunch with Tom Sutterland a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that there was a race between us to get translation software done.”
I suppose that makes sense. There are a lot of people trying to do what we’re doing. The
