The Janitor Asked To Leave Early For A Date — Then The CEO Who Laughed At Him Discovered He Was The Only Thing Standing Between Her And Total Collapse

Part 9

He didn’t say yes that day.

He said he needed time, which was true, and she said she understood, which was also true, and they left the sub-basement in the same elevator with the specific quality of silence that exists between two people who have just said something that can’t be unsaid and haven’t yet decided what to do with the shape it’s made in the air between them.

She went back to her office. He went back to the server corridor, where Dara and James were doing the work with the focused efficiency of people who have found the problem’s actual structure and are no longer fighting the symptoms.

At 4:15 p.m. the trading floor’s primary channel came back online.

The risk manager named Calloway came out of his office again, looked at his screen, and exhaled in a way that made the person next to him visibly relax simply from witnessing it. Someone further down the floor said something that was not audible from the hallway but produced a collective decompression in the room that Marcus could feel from thirty feet away.

He watched it from the corridor.

Dara came and stood beside him. “We’re at about sixty percent remediation. The deep infrastructure work will take another sixteen hours. But nothing else is going to break today.”

“Good.”

“James traced the probe origin. Eastern Europe, most likely Poland or Ukraine, professional-grade routing to obscure the exact location. He’s writing it up for whoever you hand it to.”

“Natalie.”

Dara looked at him. “You’re calling her Natalie.”

“Ms. Reeve.”

“You said Natalie.”

“I’ve been in this building for eleven months. I know everyone’s name.”

Dara watched him for a moment with the expression she had used on him occasionally since they’d been colleagues — the expression of someone who sees more than they’re being shown and is deciding what to do about the surplus.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“About which part.”

“All of it. The job. The — everything.”

He looked at the trading floor through the glass. The people in there moving with the restored energy of a system that was working again, doing what they did, the visible portion of something that had an invisible portion that he had spent eleven months maintaining.

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

“That’s allowed,” Dara said. “It’s a lot.”

“Yes.”

“For what it’s worth.” She paused. “You’re the best at this that I’ve ever worked with. And I’ve worked with the best.”

“You’ve been working in Austin for two years.”

“And they’re very good in Austin.” She turned back toward the sub-basement door. “I’m just saying.”

He called Sophie at five.

Ruth answered and then there was the sound of the phone changing hands and then Sophie’s voice, which had a particular quality he had not been able to adequately describe to anyone who’d asked — not that many people asked, but the ones who did always got an inadequate description. The best he’d ever managed was: like something that hasn’t been disappointed enough times yet to protect itself.

“Daddy. Did you see me?”

“I heard you were wonderful.”

“Aunt Ruth said you could see through the window.”

“Did you believe her?”

A pause. Sophie was seven and she considered things. It was one of her qualities. “I believed that you wanted to be there,” she said.

He closed his eyes.

“I’m going to make it up to you,” he said.

“You don’t have to make it up. You just have to come next time.”

“Deal,” he said. “How was your line?”

“I was great,” Sophie said, with complete equanimity. “I practiced it a lot.”

“I know.”

“Daddy. Are you okay?”

“I’m getting there,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Soph.”

He hung up and sat in the corridor for a moment with the phone in his hand and the hum of the building around him.

Getting there.

That was the accurate version.