Page 176 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

She does.

“Have you attempted a rollback?”

Jeffrey nods. “Twice. It stabilizes temporarily, then the corruption reappears.”

“So it’s persistent.”

“Yeah.”

“That suggests an embedded trigger.”

Sara folds her arms. “We thought the same thing.”

I narrow my eyes. “Fix it.”

Jeffrey huffs out a short laugh. “We’re trying.”

“Try faster.”

I step closer to the screen, isolating sections of the code, tracking the inconsistencies. There’s logic here. Structure. Whoever did this knew exactly where to apply pressure without causing immediate failure.

Which means, “They wanted it to pass initial checks.”

Sara nods. “And fail later.”

“At the demo.”

Jeffrey exhales. “That would be catastrophic.”

“Yes.”

I straighten. “We don’t have the luxury of assumptions. I want full system isolation. No external access. No modifications without clearance.”

“You’ve got it,” Sara says.

“And I want a clean rebuild of the affected sequence.”

Jeffrey grimaces. “That’ll take time.”

“Then start.”

Waking up beside Addy felt dangerously simple.

This doesn’t.

This feels like standing in a cockpit while warning alarms trigger one after another.

Hours pass, unnoticed. The code becomes increasingly familiar, the inconsistencies more apparent the deeper I go. There’s a structure beneath it that doesn’t align with our current architecture.

My phone vibrates against the desk. I ignore it, assuming it’ll stop.

It doesn’t.

The second buzz drags my attention away from the code long enough to see Bryce’s name lighting up the screen.

Fuck.

I answer without thinking. “Now isn’t a good time.”