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“I know.” She smiles. “Don’t worry. Maybe we can catch up next week, when you’re done?”
Her face is like the sun, blindingly beautiful. Her summer-sky eyes are clear and hold no resentment or frustration. Kai’s words about marriage fly through my mind like the birds soaring above us:You see it as a ball and chain around your ankle. You don’t think a girl exists who will treat you like a homing pigeon, letting you fly free with the knowledge that you’ll come home when you’re ready.
She lifts up on tiptoes and kisses me, just once. Then she moves back.
“I get one kiss,” I say, “Gus gets a hundred. How’s that fair?”
“His ears are softer than yours.”
“Fair enough. I’ll speak to you soon,” I tell her firmly.
“Okay.” She waves to Jamie and Emma in the car, gives me one last smile, and goes inside.
I return to the car, feeling a mixture of emotions: sad, wistful, hopeful, and energetic all at once. I’m excited about finishing the project, and I can already feel the hyper-focus ready to kick in. As much as I’ve enjoyed Christmas, I love my work, and I’m ready to throw myself back into it.
And when I’m done, hopefully Sidnie will be waiting, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
*
Jamie drops me and Gus at the office, then heads home with Emma.
Even over the holidays, some of the staff is here. I chat for a while with Matiu, our head of security. He’s married, but his kids are grown up and his house is full of grandchildren, so after a noisy Christmas Day, he was more than happy to escape on Boxing Day. He lets me into the building, and Gus and I walk through the empty offices, enjoying the peace and quiet.
There will be a few staff keeping an eye on Marise, making sure she runs smoothly at all times. My team will be in tomorrow first thing, and they’ll be working all hours to get the project finished. Today, though, it’s just me.
I go into my office, open the sliding doors, and let Gus out. The garden is fenced so he can’t escape, not that he’d want to. He likes sniffing about and spends most of his time asleep on the deck.
Leaving him there, I walk back through the offices and down to Marise’s room. I open the door and go inside.
The machine hall is over an acre in size, brightly lit, with a spotless, white-tiled floor. Marise gives the room a blue glow. Her monolithic black cabinets hold over 160,000 computer processing units. These must be kept under thirty degrees Celsius, and without cooling they’d quickly rise to over a hundred degrees in a matter of seconds, which would be like having a hundred household electric heaters operating within a meter-square space. She therefore has a large water-based liquid cooling unit that fills the air with a dull roar. A complicated secondary pipe system carries the cooled water close to the CPUs, then as the temperature rises, sends it to heat exchangers to be cooled back down. Inside the processors are twenty miles of Infiniband double data rate cabling to connect the thousands of nodes. She’s a thing of beauty, and my pride and joy.
This hall is kept spotless to avoid contamination to the computer. Visitors and those who work here wear white coats, and touching the machine is forbidden.
Today, though, I rest a light hand on the nearest cabinet. Her roar is deafening—if I was to spend more than fifteen minutes in here, I’d need ear plugs. But at least nobody will be able to hear me talking to myself.
“You’ll always be my first love,” I say. “But I hope you’ll understand that there’s someone else in my life now.”
She continues to roar, but to me it’s as if she’s singing. She’s like Sidnie—beautiful, elegant, and I’m utterly obsessed with her.
I rub my thumb over one of the screws holding the cabinet together. Then I turn, leave the hall, and go back to my office.
It’s time to get to work.
Chapter Twenty
Sidnie
It proves to be a relatively quiet week.
On Tuesday, we visit the private clinic where Dad is finally given the drug he needs, and he’s told to return in three weeks for the next dose. We take him home and spend the next few days keeping a close eye on him, as some of the side effects of the drug can be severe.
I don’t have to work at Lubricanz, but I do a couple of cleaning jobs to keep Dodie happy. Other than that, I go out for lunch with Caro and Hana one day, and do some shopping for Mum. But with plenty of spare time on my hands, I finally get stuck into writing my book.
I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve had such inspiration lately, or if it’s because I can escape from the real world into my fiction, but the words come easily, and I find myself writing several thousand words a day. I have a battered old laptop, and sometimes I sit in Dad’s bedroom, or next to him on the sofa, and write while he dozes in front of the TV. Occasionally I go in the garden and sit under the umbrella, and let the warmth of the summer sun and the smell of the lemon trees waft over me as the words flow.
Not surprisingly, the hero of my romance novel is tall, dark, and gorgeous. I decide to make him a billionaire, and smart, too. Basically, it’s a biography of a rather handsome nerd that I know, but I’m having too much fun to change him. My heroine falls head over heels with him quickly, and then it’s time to write the first love scene. I have a whale of a time directing them in the bedroom, then have to go inside for a cold shower afterward.
I tell Mack about it when he texts me. I hadn’t expected to hear from him at all, but he messages me often, usually at erratic times—five a.m. or eleven thirty p.m., or when he’s running in his gym, or when Nadine forces him to stop for five minutes and eat lunch. The texts are short and sweet, distracted and occasionally filled with baffling information. Our conversations tend to go like this:
