by Ruthie Knox
She wrung her hands in her lap. “Could you call a meeting, do you think? Because there are a lot of rumors flying around, and with you still on leave and Mike in charge, people are kind of … squirrelly.”
Sean frowned. He wouldn’t be around to call a meeting. This visit had already kept him in California two days longer than he’d planned. Two days of meetings and arguments and phone conferences, a lot of it so tedious, he’d wanted to scream.
“I’ll send a memo,” he said.
“Oh. Okay.”
He could tell it wasn’t good enough. His decision to take a leave of absence had been fine for a while, but now Anderson Owens needed him, and he couldn’t stay. He couldn’t even say when he was coming back.
“I’ll do a videoconference tomorrow after I get to Camelot,” he said. “Ask Laurie to set it up, will you?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’d better get back to it.” She stood and started for his office door.
“Thanks for the update,” he called as she disappeared down the hall.
He owed these people an explanation for his absence, but he didn’t know what to tell them. That there was an urn on the kitchen counter at his mother’s house with her ashes in it? That she’d left the attic full of a lifetime’s worth of junk?
That she’d died alone, and a lot of people had come to her funeral, but no one had cried?
His mother had been a high school teacher. A smart woman, and the most self-centered person Sean had ever met. She’d upstaged him at his middle school graduation, shaking his homeroom teacher’s hand afterward and working the conversation around to her own achievements so quickly that before Sean had even finished checking out his diploma, the teacher was congratulating her on her recent completion of eight credits toward her master’s degree.
Then she’d framed the diploma and stuck it up on the living room wall. One more testament to what an excellent mother she was.
Sean had been seventeen when he figured out that his mom wasn’t “eccentric” or “unusual” or “a little different.” In the waiting room for speech therapy, he’d leafed through a popular psychology magazine and found an article on narcissistic personality disorder. She fit every box in the sidebar’s checklist.
Unable to attend to conversation that didn’t revolve around herself? Check.
Impatient? Check.
Superficial? Check.
Oversensitive? Check.
Short-tempered? Check.
Jenny Owens had been mentally ill, and she’d left no one to mourn her but a son who wasn’t any good at it. When he thought about her, he felt nothing so clean and simple as sadness. He felt bound. Entangled.
No penance would change what had happened between them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have to pay for it.
Sean laced his fingers behind his head, propping his feet up on the desk.
At least Anderson Owens’s problems weren’t the fault of his negligence. They weren’t any fault of Mike’s, either. The issue was straight-up competition. Corporate evolution.
He and Mike had built their business model around Syntek servers because those were the servers they knew how to protect. Those were the servers they knew how to hack. But Syntek lost market share every year, and Anderson Owens no longer had an edge over the competition. In twelve months, they’d given up a dozen big contracts to competitors, six of them in the last quarter.
He needed to come up with a new security product. A quantum leap in technology, an ingenious new idea.
He had bupkis.
Mike stuck his shaved head into the office, a basketball under his arm. “Hoops?”
“Sure.”
“Meet you out there in ten.”
Sean left his pen on his desk, flipped off the light, and walked down the hall to the locker room. He pulled clean workout shorts and a T-shirt out of his locker. Somebody washed the clothes and folded them and put them away; he didn’t know who anymore. In Silicon Valley, you couldn’t skimp on employee amenities. Not if you wanted to have the best employees.
The court was behind the building, at the center of an outdoor track where Sean had put in a lot of hours running and thinking. He looked at the green hills and the valley stretching out below, the blue sky. Fifty-five degrees and sunny. Perfect Southern California winter weather.
None of it felt real.
Mike emerged from the building, and wordlessly they began to play. Their shoes squeaked on recycled rubber. They talked trash, joked around. Kept it light. Sean started to sweat.
Mike raised the intensity, and soon he was slapping at the ball, rebounding aggressively. The game turned mean, but neither of them said a word. Sean took an elbow to the cheekbone and didn’t even consider calling the foul.
Mike had every right to be angry with him.
When Sean’s quads trembled and the back of his shirt had soaked through, Mike abruptly called the game, and they switched to Horse to cool down.
They were on R when Mike asked, “So how long are you staying?”
“I’m flying back tonight.”
Sean sank a free throw, and the ball came right back to him the way it sometimes did on a good shot. He scooped it up and stepped aside, handing it to Mike as he stepped up to the line.
Mike went through his whole free-throw routine. Three bounces. Pause. Another bounce. Some kind of mumbling incantation he’d always done.
Perfect shot.
“I talked to K-kelly,” Sean said.
“Yeah, I saw her coming out of your office.”
“I’ll do a videoconference tomorrow with her and the other VPs. Ease their minds.”
Mike said nothing. Which wasn’t like him at all.
Had it not been for Mike, Sean might never have left Camelot. Even the company had come about because of Mikey, the consequence of a challenge he’d thrown out late one beer-fueled night when he and Sean were college hobby hackers batting wouldn’t-it-be-cool scenarios back and forth. Mike wanted to figure out how to open a port on a Syntek server undetected, and Sean proposed to design a rootkit that would turn the server into a slave without giving off any signals a system administrator could pick up on.
The perfect hack.
They worked on it for months, gradually turning over more and more of their free time to the project, day and night. Skipping classes and meals. But whereas Mike got so caught up in the details he didn’t stop to think about the implications of what they were doing, Sean thought about the implications all the time.
There were Syntek servers all over the country. In every branch of government, in educational testing banks, hooked in to the New York Stock Exchange. And suddenly, one night, after weeks of effort, Sean and Mike gained the ability to control them all invisibly.
For Mike, it had been a pure hack, done for its own sake. He wanted to erase the evidence and never use the tools they’d designed again.
Sean spent most of the contents of his savings account on a business suit, designed a PowerPoint presentation, and bullied his way into a meeting with the CEO of a company that relied on Syntek servers to protect tens of thousands of credit card numbers and other personal data.
Your data is vulnerable, and we’re the only company that can protect it.
He neglected to mention that he and Mike were also the people threatening the data. Not his finest ethical moment, but it wasn’t as though he and Mike were special snowflakes. If they could break into a Syntek server, somebody else could, too.
They got the contract.
In that moment, Sean became someone different. Not the stammering ragamuffin freak who’d left home at seventeen, but a man with a destiny. A ruthless, talented, calculating businessman who sold security to corporations whose bottom line he’d threatened with his own curiosity.
He and Mike built their fluke into a real business, becoming experts in an industry they’d only dabbled in before. And at some point in the first year or two of Anderson Owens, their friendship shifted. Sean became the leader, and Mike b
egan to follow him.
Sean bricked a three-pointer. “That’s R.” He handed over the ball. Mike made an easy layup.
“Have you heard any of Judah Pratt’s more recent albums?” Sean asked.
“You’re still thinking about that guy?”
“Ssome.” Sean went in for the layup and missed. “S.”
Mike caught the rebound and held it under his arm. “I refuse to feed your obsession.”
“I’m n-not obsessed with him. It’s work.”
Mike snorted. “You work here. Whatever you’re doing out there in Ohio, it’s not work. It’s play.”
“Fine. It’s p-play.”
It had been four days since he and Katie arrived home from Louisville. Four days and one night since she’d returned to their shared suite and asked him to drive her home. He hadn’t seen her since. “And I’m not obsessed,” he mumbled.
“You’ve been gone eight months, on leave for seven. You haven’t quit, but you won’t come home. You’re asking me questions about some celebrity. Ergo, you’re obsessed.” Mike punctuated his statement with a perfect shot from the three-point line.
“Ffforget it,” Sean said, wondering when Mike had become the kind of guy who said ergo. He retrieved the ball. Took the shot. Missed.
“That’s game.”
Sean walked back to the building and leaned over the water fountain for a drink. When he turned around, Mike was watching him.
“What?” Sean asked.
“You’re stuttering again.”
“N-not m-m-much.”
Mike’s smirk spoke volumes.
Sean shrugged it off. “It’s the p-place,” he said. “It gets to me.”
“The basketball court?”
“No, asshole. The town. C-camelot.”
But it wasn’t that simple. He’d been living in Ohio for months, talking to lawyers and court officials and clients of Camelot Security. Talking to Caleb so often, they’d become something like partners. Something like friends.
Until he went to Louisville with Katie, his stutter had been all potential, an infection waiting for his system to weaken. Now it was creeping in.
“It’s not like it’s bad,” Mike offered. “The stutter, I mean. Camelot sucks, same as always.” He walked over and leaned one shoulder against the wall, ball under his free arm.
“No, it’s not bad,” Sean agreed. “B-but it’s getting worse.”
Mike chewed on the inside of his cheek, a sure sign he wanted to say something he knew Sean wouldn’t want to hear.
“What?” Sean asked warily.
“The relapse rate is high, right?”
“Yeah.” The relapse rate was astronomical. It was extremely rare for adults who stuttered to be permanently cured through therapy.
It happened, though. Sean thought it had happened to him. It was starting to look like he’d been kidding himself.
“Do you need to be doing those voice exercises again?”
“No, I need to get my ass out of C-camelot.” If he stayed in San Jose, it would cure him. Not because it was a better place, but because it was his place. In California, Sean had money and power and status, prizes he’d claimed after years of working every shitty part-time job he could get his hands on and eating noodles purchased in ten-packs at the dollar store. Years of trying to figure out how to make a life when he’d thrown away the one he was born with.
In San Jose, he spoke in a voice he had sculpted with a scalpel. A clear, firm, no-nonsense voice that got people’s attention.
Katie was the problem. His infatuation with her tied him to the past. He couldn’t be around her without revisiting all the worst feelings that had dogged him through adolescence.
He needed to escape Camelot all over again.
Mike must have seen the tension in his expression. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Why haven’t you done that yet?”
Sean put his back to the wall and slid to the ground. “I’m wuh-working on it.”
But he wasn’t. He hadn’t so much as moved the Riverside Shakespeare off his mother’s kitchen table.
She’d been reading Hamlet the day the aneurysm killed her. He’d been three thousand miles away. The same three thousand miles that had separated them every day for what turned out to be the last twelve years of her life.
Sean had severed his connection to his mother completely and permanently. He didn’t know how to explain the hold she had on him now, except that she turned out to be as difficult in death as she’d been in life.
That, and the fact that she’d loved him, and he’d discarded her.
“Sean.” Something sober in Mike’s voice made him look up. “Kelly probably didn’t tell you this, but we’ve been talking to the Syntek people. They want to buy us out, make us the core of a revamped in-house security division. I’m not sure we should say no. Not with the bank calling in that loan.”
Anger rose up in a black wave, and Sean had to work hard to push it back down where it belonged. “We’ll come up with something so we don’t have to do that.”
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”
Mike sighed. “It might be too late for that. Maybe we’re better off selling.”
Sean shot him a dirty look. “I’ll figure it out,” he said stiffly.
“Fine,” Mike replied, just as rigid. “Give me a call when you do.” He took a seat next to Sean against the building, and they sat in silence for a minute, staring at the sky. Too blue for February.
“I k-kissed her,” Sean said.
Mike whistled. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
Rubbing his hand over his scalp with a familiar scraping sound, Mike asked, “Did she like it?”
“Yeah, I think she did.” He smiled slightly, remembering those ten minutes in the hallway when things had been going his way. “But that was b-before she went up to his room.”
“She slept with him?”
“I doubt it. I think she planned to.”
“That’s kind of fucked up.”
“Yep.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
Sean didn’t reply.
“Don’t even tell me you still aren’t talking to her.”
“Even if I were, I wouldn’t have asked her. She was pretty pissed at me for k-kissing her. I didn’t exactly get permission.”
He thought of the hot challenge in her eyes when she’d put her foot up on the chair to strap her shoe on. Her naked leg and the flash of pink panties she’d given him.
The back of his skull hit the wall with a dull thud.
“You want my advice?” Mike asked. “Give it up, man. I know it can’t be easy for you, dealing with all your shit back home, but you’re not going to figure it out just by hanging around there. It’s messing with your head. I can come out and pack up your mom’s stuff, or we can hire somebody to do it. You need to get out of there and focus on what’s really important.”
There was no arguing with him. Even this week, when the business needed him, he’d been staying up late every night, trawling cyberspace for data about Judah Pratt. His brain felt sludgy, off-kilter from too much coffee and too much Camelot, Ohio.
“You know what people ssay to me, everywhere I go?” he asked. “They say, ‘Sean! You grew!’ ”
Mike snorted. “No arguing with that.”
“It’s been more than a decade, Mikey. You’d think they’d get over it. But no, every time I leave the house, I have to hear about it. I stop at the post office to mail something, and B-bev behind the counter says, ‘Sean! I can’t get over how tall you are. I thought you’d never hit your growth spurt.’ ”
“People don’t forget anything there.”
Sean nodded his head in agreement.
Rolling the ball back and forth between his knees, Mike said, “You know she’s just a girl, right?” Mike asked.
Sean stiffened. “Drop it.”
“She’s an average small-town girl. Kinda pr
etty, but nothing special. She’s not worth it.”
Katie wasn’t just a girl. She was special. She was kind and open-hearted, and he’d been awful to her.
The next time he saw her, he would talk. If he sounded like shit, it was no worse than he deserved.
“Drop it,” he repeated. He snagged the ball from under Mike’s knee.
“Well, if you’re going to be in love with her, can you do something about it? Can you get her into bed or ask her out, or at least talk to her? Because it’s kind of painful watching you suck at this from the other side of the country.”
“I’m not in love with her, and I am doing something,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out Pratt.”
Sean would solve this one last puzzle for Caleb, pack up the house, and sell it. Apologize to Katie and show her he could behave like a normal human being, albeit a stammering one.
Then he would get the hell out of Dodge. Get back where his tongue worked and he knew who he was.
“What about him are you trying to figure out?”
“What he wants from Katie.”
Mike ran his hands over his head again. “I thought you said he wanted to get in her pants.”
“No,” Sean said. “That’s the weird thing. He acted like he d-did, but I’m pretty sure Judah Pratt is gay.”
Chapter Eleven
Katie raised her torso off the floor for another crunch, singing along to “I Will Survive,” which she’d turned all the way up to eleven for therapeutic purposes.
“I hate this song,” her brother complained from his position holding her feet. “More than all the other songs that have ever been recorded put together.”
“You just have a problem—” Crunch. “—with female empowerment.” Crunch.
Caleb shook his head wearily. His gray T-shirt was dark with sweat. He’d dragged himself out of Ellen’s bed at six a.m. to run on the treadmill in his basement while Katie used the stair-climber, had spotted her while she lifted weights, and here he was counting her crunches—all evidence of the fact that her brother had no issues whatsoever with female empowerment. She knew she shouldn’t give him such a hard time, but she’d woken up feeling sassy, and this song epitomized her mental state.