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She’d done exactly what Jinny had said she always did: she’d pushed Jonathan away before he could get too close. Esther had told herself it was because she didn’t care about him the way he wanted her to, but that was a lie. She cared about him plenty. Too much. So much it had terrified her. Things had gotten too real, and she’d run.
She wasn’t incapable of love. She was just too afraid. She was so scared of being rejected that she made sure to do the rejecting first.
Jonathan was decent and kind and he’d actually liked her. And she’d liked him back. She hadn’t just been attracted to him, she’d actually enjoyed his company. She probably could have loved him if she’d let herself. But instead she’d ruined everything between them. Thrown away their friendship by sleeping with him, then thrown away any chance of something more by pushing him away.
She’d been so afraid of getting hurt, she’d hurt herself.
And now it was too late to repair the damage. Even if he’d been willing to forgive her at this point—which seemed like a long shot—he was with someone else. Any chance she’d ever had of getting him back was lost.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Monday morning, Esther stared at her computer screen, trying to remind herself that things weren’t so bad. She was friends with Jinny and Yemi again. She was going to knitting tonight for the first time in three weeks. She had a job, a roof over her head, and a good health insurance plan. Not to mention her cat. There was a lot to be thankful for.
Okay, her mother was about to be evicted, and Esther had probably thrown away the best shot at love she’d had in years, but life wasn’t perfect. You can’t fix everything, she reminded herself. Focus on the good. Concentrate on things within your control. That was the ticket to happiness. Or at least survival.
She tried to focus on the assembly file on her screen. She was working on some of the parts for Dan’s sub-assembly and in order to finish the schematics, she’d needed to pull up the 3-D model at the next higher level to see how her part fit with everything else. It wasn’t something the designers did often, because it was a huge file that took a long time to load.
Esther spun the model around, studying the section where her parts went. Then she leaned forward, squinting at the screen. That…wasn’t right. Was it? She spun it around some more, looked at it more closely, and read all the design notes.
It wasn’t going to work.
Dan’s proposal, the one they’d chosen over hers in the bake-off, had a fatal flaw. To accommodate the more spread-out design, the data cables had to be longer. Which meant they’d pick up electromagnetic noise that would give a less useable output by the time it hit the antenna to be transmitted down. And the radio spectrometer they were using had a low power draw that made the signal extra sensitive to loss.
Esther leaned back in her chair. Yemi was on a conference call behind her and had his headset on. He was in a peer review session which was likely to go on for another couple hours. If she wanted to get his opinion, she’d have to wait.
She didn’t need his opinion though. She knew what she was seeing. She knew she was right. Once they started putting their components into the live model, it would be obvious to everyone.
Esther had two choices. One: do nothing. Wait for Dan to upload his parts to the assembly file, and let one of the other teams point out that he’d screwed up. He’d look incompetent in front of the entire project team, and Dmitri and Bhavin would both look bad for letting him get this far with a sloppy design.
Then there was option two: go tell Bhavin what she’d found so Dan could fix his mistake before anyone else saw it.
Option one was sorely tempting. It would feel good to watch them all squirm after they’d discounted her proposal—which would have avoided this issue entirely, by the way.
The problem was, it might be weeks before they noticed the issue. And once they identified the problem, they’d have to go back and fix it, which would eat even more time. It could cause them to slip their next delivery date, which could cause a bow wave that might slip the entire project.
It would also be all Dan’s fault, and everyone would know it. It would be vindication. Sweet, sweet vindication.
The question was whether Esther was willing to let the project slip in order to finally prove to everyone else that she was right.
With a bone-deep sigh, she pushed her chair back and walked over to Bhavin’s desk. “Can I show you something?” she asked him.
He followed her back to her cubicle, and she showed him the assembly file. His hand tapped nervously against his thigh as she spun it around for him, pointed out the problem, and let him read the requirements documents for himself. By the time he’d digested it all, his hand was twitching so fast it was almost a blur.
“I’m gonna need to talk to Dmitri,” he said, and walked off.
Esther sat back down at her desk and tried to work on something else while she waited to find out what they would do. When Yemi finally got done with his teleconference, she told him what she’d found.
“You did the right thing,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “But I really wanted to do the wrong thing. What does that say about me?”
He shook his head, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Nothing. Everyone has bad impulses. What matters is how you choose to act.”
At four o’clock, Bhavin came back and headed straight to Esther’s desk. “Nice catch,” he said. “You just saved all our asses.”
Forty-five minutes later, Dmitri sent an email out to both teams, copied to both the project manager and the VP above him, announcing that they were scrapping the previous sub-assembly plans and going with Esther’s proposal instead. Without naming names, he explained the interference that had necessitated the change, and reiterated to the designers the importance of checking all the requirements documents and taking into account the other systems involved.
The email concluded by praising Esther by name for discovering the issue before it became critical and providing an elegant fix. He even used the phrase “team player.”
