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I jumped up and darted to the door. “Idosay so! It’s a soft-G sound! GUH!”
Still striding away from me, he dramatically shrugged his shoulders.
I went to the railing that overlooked the main room. Dave was sitting in a bean bag with his laptop propped up on his legs, while Nancy was in one of the cubicles.
“Quick poll,” I called down to them. “Is it pronouncedJIForGIF?”
Dave cleared his throat and said, “I think it’s JIF, Ms. Moltisanti.”
“I told you to call me Amber. And no, it’s not JIF!”
Nacy grimaced up at me from her cubicle. “Hate to say it, but I agree. It’s JIF.”
“No!” I yelled. “It’s GIF! Because the G stands forgraphical, so it retains theguhsound!”
They both shrugged at me and returned to their computer screens. I spun away from the railing only to find Owen leaning against his office doorway, arms crossed and watching me with a huge smile on his face.
I let out an annoyed growl and stomped back to my office.
Jude, Owen, and Melinda had a meeting that afternoon. I wasn’t invited to it, but I overheard some of the discussion when I went to get an energy drink from the kitchen. Apparently one of the investors, some rich Italian guy, wanted to visit the building to sign the financing documents in person. Owen thought it was a good idea to give the investor whatever he wanted, but Jude was hesitant to let anyone into the building untilafterthe papers were signed.
“What are you afraid of?” I heard Owen say as I walked down the hall. “You think he’s going to see something he doesn’t like, close his legs, and walk back out the door without sleeping with us?”
“I just don’t know,” Jude said, but by then I was too far away to hear anything more.
Michelle was staying with Phil all week, and I didn’t want to go home to a big, empty house that night. Instead, I took my laptop down to California Street and set up in a coffee shop one block away from the Grosvenor Building where Owen lived. I opened my laptop, selected his Wi-Fi network, and began a basic port-sniffing protocol to see if there were any vulnerabilities.
I hacked away for two hours without any luck. My last stunt at his condo must have spooked Owen, because his home system was locked down tighter than a nun’s snatch. Even the various smart appliances had been manually updated with newer firmware. I couldn’t find a single point of entry.
“It’sGIF, goddamnit,” I muttered in annoyance. I didn’t like failing multiple times in the same day. I gathered my laptop and left the coffee shop. Yet as I walked down the street in the opposite direction of the Grosvenor building, the hair on the back of my neck suddenly stood up. I stopped and looked back at the building. Leaning on the terrace railing, holding a stemmed wine glass in one hand, was Owen. His free hand scratched the orange cat that was perched on the railing next to him.
I couldn’t see it from this distance, but I knew there was a wide smile on his dumb face. I raised my middle finger in his direction and continued walking.
20
Amber
I still didn’t want to return to my empty house, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep while I was mad at Owen, so I decided to head back to the office. By now it was nine o’clock at night, and everyone else was gone. Just how I liked it. An empty house reminded me of the hole in my chest that had formed when my dad died, but an empty office? To me, that was peaceful in a different kind of way.
But when I went upstairs, I realized that the building wasn’tcompletelyempty.
Jude flinched when I knocked on his open door. “Sorry, didn’t mean to surprise you,” I said.
He smiled when he saw it was me and said, “I was so focused on my screen that I never even saw you.”
“Are you working on any code?” I asked hopefully. I was seized by the overwhelming urge to join him, to put our heads together again and lose ourselves in the methodical, but creative, programming work.
“Contract stuff,” he replied with a heavy sigh. “For the Series A financing. The lawyers are great at writing most of the bones of the contract, but there are a few technical stipulations they have totally mangled.”
“Can’t that wait until tomorrow? I thought the contract isn’t being signed for another week or two.”
“If I put this off, then it means putting off the other seven hundred things I have on my list.” Jude gave me a crooked, rueful grin. “That’s the dirty little secret about being your own boss. You don’t really get to choose your own hours because you never actuallystopworking.”
“I hear that. I spent about twenty hours a day in front of my screen when we were tits-deep in ArgoCoin development.”
Jude cocked his head at me. “You’re here late. Forget something?”
“Nah,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I couldn’t sleep. So I figured I would get a head start on the Stellar side-chain integration. It’s going to be a bitch trying to figure out some of the details.”
