"Still alive. So am I. I’m counting that as a win."
She laughed. "You’ll fit in fine."
Through the glass walls, I could see concept artists at dual-monitor setups, sketching character designs that looked half-finished and entirely beautiful. Programmers hunched over code, headphones on, the universal sign for don’t talk to me. A testing room in the corner where someone was playing through what looked like a boss fight, dying repeatedly and taking notes between each attempt. The walls were covered in framed artwork from past titles, and a glass case near the elevator held awards. Golden joysticks, BAFTA Games nominations, a D.I.C.E. trophy.
This was what Jace Hunter had built—this entire floor of creativity and precision and obsessive attention to detail. It was his.
Jace’s office stayed closed all day. Emails came. Bullet points. Instructions without greetings or sign-offs. I did what was asked, filed what needed filing, answered the calls he rerouted to my desk, and didn’t knock on his door.
But at the end of the day, when the floor had emptied and the cleaning crew started their rounds, I saw him.
He was standing by the elevator bank, alone. He'd put on gloves. Thin, dark leather, pulled on with the care of someone performing a ritual, each finger tugged into place, the leather smoothed over his wrists. Then the hand sanitizer came out. Applied over the gloves—which made no practical sense. But heworked it into the leather anyway, finger by finger, thorough and unhurried, his eyes never lifting from his own hands. I watched him for longer than I meant to.
A group of employees rounded the corner, laughing about something. Jace stepped to the side. A full-body flinch that put three extra feet between him and the nearest person. His shoulders drew up. His chin dropped. And for one second, before the mask slid back into place, I saw it.
Was his aversion to people not just ego—not just his world being too big for everyone else?
I’d thought he hated me particularly. Now it looked like he hated everyone equally. I was more than curious. A bad habit I never dropped.
The elevator arrived, and he stepped in alone as the doors closed. The floor went quiet.
That night, on Miley’s couch, with her twelve-dollar candle burning on the coffee table and a container of leftover Thai from the place on Calle Ocho balanced on my knee, I opened my laptop and typed his name.
Jace Hunter.
The results were business, almost exclusively. Industry profiles. Keynote speeches at gaming expos. Interviews about Hunter Interactive’s development philosophy, their proprietary engine, the Meridian launch timeline. A Forbes feature from three years ago called him "the most private CEO in the gaming industry", which felt like calling the ocean "damp".
No social media. No candid photos. No interviews where he talked about anything other than frame rates and fiscal quarters.
But buried in a lifestyle magazine piece, one of those fluffy articles about executives and their hobbies, I found a detail that stopped me mid-scroll.
He collected orchids. Rare ones. Kept them at his home. The article described it as a "meticulous private collection".
There was a photo of a Dendrobium nobile, petals pale pink and delicate, and a caption that read:Hunter’s collection includes several species considered endangered in their native habitats.
I stared at the screen.He grew flowers?
I kept scrolling. Past the business profiles, past the industry awards, past a photo of him at E3 where he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on the planet. And then, in an older archived piece from a wire service, a single line buried in the third paragraph of an article about Hunter Interactive’s founding.
Hunter, whose family relocated him to London following a kidnapping incident, has maintained a notably private personal life.
One line. No details. No follow-up. Just a fact dropped into a sentence like punctuation, like it didn’t rewrite everything.
I closed the laptop. Sat in the dim living room, the candle throwing shadows across the ceiling, the Thai food growing cold on my knee.
"You okay?" Miley asked from the kitchen doorway.
"Yeah." I wasn’t. But explaining meant saying it out loud, and I wasn’t ready for that. "Just thinking."
"About work?"
"About orchids."
She gave me a look. "That’s either very zen or very concerning."
"Probably both."
I went to bed but didn’t sleep right away. I lay in the dark and thought about the space between who someone showed the world and who they were when nobody was watching. About gloves in an elevator, orchids in a private collection, and a Rubik’s cube on the corner of a perfectly organized desk.
