Page 33 of Her Last Vow

"I'm aware of that." His voice cracked slightly on the last word and then it softened when he added, "I'm more aware of it than you might think."

Rachel waited, watching him work through something before he said it out loud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He said nothing at first, simply looking to the sky as if trying to figure out if it was going to rain later today. When he leveled his eyes back to her, she saw a profound sadness that had not been there five seconds ago.

"I'm sick," Sloan said finally. "Terminally ill. Pancreatic cancer." He chuckled in a dry, defeated sound. "My own doctors missed it for years, because I didn't fit the profile they were looking for, and by the time somebody finally ordered the right scan, it had already spread too far to do much about." He said it without emotion, and she wondered how long he had been practicing it. "That's why I built Apogee, not for the watches or the app store money. Of course, I had started long before my diagnoses, but the diagnosis…that's what lit the fire over the last two or three years. I wanted to build something that could see what medicine missed in me. Something that wouldn't need a doctor's hunch to catch what was coming before it was too late to matter."

Neither Rachel nor Novak spoke. It felt almost rude to interject when it was clear that this was something he needed to get out.

"Ever since I learned of Pike…it seems to have just exploded inside of me," Sloan went on, his voice thinner now than it had been even a minute earlier. "The stress, I mean. I haven’t eaten. I slept like shit last night even without your call. My oncologist tells me stress won't kill me any faster on its own, but I don't think she's accounting for what it's like to watch something you built become this weird sort of silent monster." He looked at Rachel directly for the first time since they'd started talking. "And no, I’m not telling you so you'd feel sorry for me. I told you because you asked me to make an impossible decision, and I thought you should understand what it's costing me to even consider it."

Rachel held his gaze, aware that the conversation had just taken a very unexpected turn. And maybe not one Sloan had expected. He had access to every prediction the algorithm generated, while also having a countdown running out on his own body. Meanwhile, he’d watched strangers cross a finish line that medicine had already told him he'd never reach himself. It wasn't hard to imagine that costing him something — a resentment, buried and maybe even unexamined, toward everyone who lived long enough to hit the peak his own doctors had missed until it was too late to matter.

"I understand what it's costing you," she said. "I do, genuinely. But that doesn't change what I'm asking of you."

"No," Sloan admitted. "I don't suppose it does."

"Shut it down today. Do it voluntarily, or I go to a judge as soon as this conversation is over and get a court order. And once that happens, it's not a quiet business decision anymore between us anymore. It's a headline about a federal court forcing a health app offline because the FBI thinks it's connected to four deaths. That's a very different story than the one you get to tell if you make this call yourself, on your own terms.”

Sloan was quiet for a long moment, his eyes moving somewhere past her shoulder, toward the building and whatever waited for him behind those glass doors. She supposed if he had a bit more energy, he may have bristled at this order, but as it stood, he only gave a small shrug.

"Do what you feel you need to do," he said.

He didn't wait for a response. He turned, adjusted the bag on his shoulder, and walked the rest of the way across the lot toward the entrance. He walked slowly, almost deliberately, until the doors slid open ahead of him and swallowed him from view.

Rachel watched the doors close behind him before she turned back toward the car. "That wasn't what I expected."

"Which part?"

"Any of it." She started walking back to their car, trying to properly compartmentalize the bit of heartbreak she was feeling for the man. "I thought he'd fight us on this. Instead he agreed the app should come down, and then told us he's dying, and still won't pull the plug himself."

"Doesn't exactly clear him," Novak said.

"No," Rachel said. "It doesn't. If anything, it gives him more reasons than anyone else on that list. He's the one person who could see every prediction whenever he wanted, and he's watching people reach a finish line he'll never get to cross."

"I hate to do it to him, but we're going to have to get that court order, aren't we?"

“Yeah. I think we do.”

And as she pulled out her phone to call Anderson, she almost felt guilty for what she was about to do.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Rachel stayed in the car after Sloan disappeared inside, mostly because something about the emotional toll of their conversation had affected her in a way she hadn’t expected. That, plus twenty-eight hours without sleep had a way of catching up all at once, the exhaustion arriving in waves instead of a steady climb. Her eyes felt gritty as she sat in the car, dry at the edges and itchy. There was a dull pressure building behind her left temple that coffee wasn't going to touch anymore.

Before she placed the call to AD Anderson, she looked out by the hood of the car, where Novak was leaning and speaking on the phone. He had taken it upon himself to call the other seven people on the list they’d compiled, making sure they knew what was going on and that, at some point this morning, they may be contacted by the police about coming under protection.

Rachel then placed the call, and Anderson picked up on the first ring. "Tell me you've got him, Gift."

"I've got a lot of things, but none of them are an arrest. Sorry." Rachel leaned her head back against the seat, watching the glass doors Sloan had vanished through. "Fourth victim this morning. Different presentation, but tied to the app. We don’t think it was the killer, but are waiting for the ME to verify.”

“So…what? Just an accident?”

“Seems that way. But sir, listen. Apogee isn’t budging. I need this app suspended, and I need it fast, before someone else dies."

"As in a court order?"

"That's what I'm asking for, yes. I want a judge who'll move on this today, not next week." She kept her voice low, keeping an ear peeled on Novak’s conversation as well. "I'm not talking about shutting down the whole company. Just the app itself.”