Chapter 3

My phone erupted, buzzing without a break.

The big group chat was busy sharing every sweet moment of his day playing boyfriend to Amanda Fox.

Sunrise at the beach. Painting couple's mugs at the pottery studio.

A movie at the theater. A full day at the fall festival.

Even a family holiday dinner with his parents.

Every one of those wishes, we'd written into our shared notes together, late at night.

He used to say his whole world was work and me.

But today he'd walked another woman openly through every stop on the itinerary I'd built for the two of us.

One by one, checking off my private love plan.

The last photo was the two of them at the very top of the Ferris wheel, making a wish at the moon.

Amanda's caption read:

【The bright moon that shone then once lit my radiant cloud home again.】

The full moon was bright. Brighter still was the beaded bracelet on her wrist.

That was the keepsake Dean Gilbert had given me.

Years ago, when I lay unconscious and near death,

he, who had never believed in any god,

knelt up all ninety-nine steps at the chapel, pressing his forehead to the stone until it bled,

begging the monk to bless the bracelet, begging me to wake.

I'd worn it every single day, never taking it off,

and he'd handed it to Amanda while I was in the hospital.

So after everything, her moon still lit her way home.

The chat overflowed with people wishing them a lifetime together.

I left the group, and I unlinked the couple's shared notes.

Dean's soothing message came right after:

"Don't take the jokes in the group seriously. It's a holiday, people just want a little fun."

"Playing along with her was just for the game, and it makes up for what I owed you. Don't get petty and jealous and say things you don't mean."

I had no interest in arguing with him anymore.

This game he'd hidden for five years, this thing that couldn't stand the light, I was out.

I organized every screenshot into a file and sent it to corporate HR.

HR replied in seconds:

"Received. He's been added to the termination list."

"Per your request, we've also held off on publishing his promotion announcement."

I didn't set foot in the office again until the product rehearsal.

Only to be told

the bracelet project had been handed to Amanda Fox on short notice.

The core team was now her people too.

My breath caught.

I've never been able to beat my fear of water.

But I know better than anyone what a drowning person needs most.

So I forced myself through the fear, two full years of it,

before I designed this SOS bracelet.

Every parameter, every algorithm carried my blood and sweat,

and now they'd claimed it all as their own.

I called my lawyer at once.

He wrote back:

"The project patent authorship is already signed. Ownership of the parameter source files is frozen."

Then he attached screenshots of the backed-up project source files, and a photo of the patent authorship confirmation receipt.

With that assurance in hand, I walked calmly into the meeting room.

"Who gave you permission to touch my project?"

Dean frowned at me.

"Your design wasn't rigorous enough."

"Three minutes is too short. The false-trigger rate runs high."

"Amanda iterated on your base and pushed the threshold out to ten minutes."

My head snapped up.

"Ten minutes means the rescue almost certainly comes too late and the person drowns."

"You turned out fine, didn't you?"

He shot it back on reflex, then fell silent the moment it left his mouth.

My throat felt packed with broken glass, the pain of it fierce.

"I was racing the reaper for every second,

and you sat there with a stopwatch, helping her collect the extreme limit values?"

His face showed something like genuine confusion.

"Other testers know they're being tested. They anticipate, they react, the data's skewed."

"You happened to fall in, with no conscious interference. It's the most perfect simulation of an extreme drowning state."

"What exactly is your problem?"

Amanda cut in too.

She looked at me, her smile heavy with meaning.

"Edna, a flexible threshold gives the product much more room to iterate and upgrade."

"We can put out multiple versions based on user feedback and demand."

"It generates more revenue too."

"Mr. Gilbert is thinking about the company's interests."

"You're the lead designer. Shouldn't you be even happier with this result?"

Their words came down like ice water over my head.

So his saving Amanda had never been a split-second choice made in a panic.

He'd been calculating my threshold to death, working out how much money it could convert into.

In those ten minutes, my fear, my suffocation, even my life,

were worth nothing next to his profit and his prospects.

I looked at him, and all I felt was how far he'd fallen.

The man in front of me now, eyes full of calculation,

had nothing left of the clean, earnest one who'd pulled someone from the water when we first met.

Meeting my cold stare, his tone softened with a little concession.

"Seven minutes, then. That works, doesn't it?"

Then he had his secretary hand over two documents.

"Sign, and I'll have Amanda keep your co-creator credit."

The agreement demanded I license my base data for free and turn the design over to Amanda for iteration and production.

The other was a nondisclosure agreement on the flexible threshold data.

I finished reading, and a sense of the absurd crawled through me until it was almost terrifying.

Steal my design, then cover my mouth, and drag me along to profit off my own blood.