Chapter 1 — Ninety Seconds

The champagne was warm, the applause was loud, and my entire life was being stolen one toast at a time.

I stood at the edge of the AURIA Labs launch party—our launch party, mine and Dylan's, mine more than his, though nobody said that out loud—watching three hundred people cheer for a product I'd coded in five hundred sleepless nights. The holographic demo shimmered above the crowd: the Emotion Graph Engine, mapping the room's collective mood in real time. My algorithm. My patent. My blood.

Dylan found me at the bar. He had that smile on—the one the tech press called "charismatic" and I called "expensive."

"Babe," he said, and kissed my temple like he was stamping a receipt. "Vanessa's here."

"Great. The Ashford check clears tomorrow, we wire the Series B, and I ship the SDK at the end of the month." I already had my phone out, pulling up the build pipeline. "I rebalanced the model last night—fifty-three percent faster inference—"

"Actually." He took my phone, turned it face-down on the bar, and held my hand. That should have been my first warning. Dylan Kane never held hands. He high-fived. He fist-bumped. He shook hands with a firm grip and made eye contact like he was closing a deal. He did not hold hands, because hands were for typing.

"I want to announce something," he said. "Tonight. Now."

"Now is the demo."

"Better than the demo." He was already walking toward the stage, dragging me by the wrist like I was a deflating balloon. The crowd parted. The spotlights found us. Dylan grabbed the mic, and I remember thinking, This is it. He's going to propose. On our company's biggest night, he's going to—

"Everyone," Dylan said, beaming, "I have incredible news. Vanessa Reyes has agreed to join AURIA as co-founder and CEO."

The room erupted.

I didn't hear the rest. Something about "scale," "enterprise," "the next chapter." I watched Vanessa glide up the steps in a white dress that cost more than my first car, shaking hands like she already owned the place. Because, I realized with a slow, chemical dread, she did. Dylan was handing her the keys.

My phone buzzed against the bar. I went numb and picked it up.

Attorney at Law. A subject line: Re: AURIA Labs — Employment, IP, and Equity Matters.

The email was forty-one pages. I read the first paragraph while the crowd chanted Vanessa's name.

As set forth in the Amended and Restated Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement dated [REDACTED], all inventions, works, and patents created during your engagement with the Company are the sole property of the Company. Your position as Chief Technology Officer is terminated effective immediately. Please return all company property, including your badge, laptop, and source-code repositories, by close of business tomorrow. Any further contact regarding the Emotion Graph Engine patent (US Patent No. [REDACTED]) should be directed to Company counsel.

I'd read the email so many times later that I could recite it in my sleep. But the first time, I only got to "terminated effective immediately" before my vision went white.

Dylan was still talking. Something about "gratitude" and "our incredible founder." Our incredible founder. Me. The founder he was, right now, firing.

I did the only thing I could do. I walked out.

The fire exit slammed behind me, and then it was just me, a concrete stairwell, and the muffled roar of three hundred people celebrating my funeral. I sat down on the third step, because my knees had stopped being load-bearing, and I cried.

Ninety seconds. I counted. Sixty of them were for five years of my life: the Stanford nights, the cold pizza, the version 0.1 that crashed so hard it deleted itself, the first investor who laughed at me, the second who tried to sleep with me, the third who actually wrote a check. Twenty more seconds were for Dylan—not the man at the podium, but the one I'd thought he was, the one who'd held my hair back when I coded through a fever, who'd said "we're a team" so many times I'd stopped hearing it.

Ten seconds were for me. For being this stupid. For signing that thing, whatever that thing was, without reading every comma.

Then I stood up, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and pulled my phone out.

"Cry later," I told the empty stairwell. "Win now."

It became my first rule of the new life. It was, I'd learn, also the only rule I'd keep.

I walked back into the party. The music had changed. Vanessa was dancing with Dylan's arm around her waist, and the room had already decided who the power couple was. I didn't look at them. I walked to the bar, ordered a water, and started making a list.

Forty-one pages. Patent number in paragraph two. Dylan's signature on the last page, probably. Vanessa's fingerprints all over the structure.

I was still writing the list when Dylan found me again, looking almost guilty, which was almost funny.

"Sloane. Hey. I know this looks bad—"

"It doesn't look bad, Dylan. It is bad. It's theft." I said it calmly, the way you'd report a weather forecast. "Forty-one pages, effective immediately. You're suing me for my own patent."

"Nobody's suing anybody." He had the gall to look wounded. "This is restructuring. You're still a shareholder—"

"I'm still a shareholder," I repeated. "With what, Dylan? Two percent? Three? Whatever I signed at our anniversary dinner, the night you proposed the 'future of us'—that wasn't a toast, was it? That was a closing."

His face flickered. Just for a second. Then the mask was back.

"It's complicated, Sloane. Business is—"

"Business is a language I speak." I smiled at him, and I felt my whole face change. "And I'm about to become very fluent in the dialects you didn't know I knew."

I left before he could answer. The valet brought my car. I sat in the driver's seat for a long time, gripping the wheel, until the shaking stopped.

Ninety seconds, I thought. That's all grief gets. The rest is arithmetic.

I drove home and started Chapter One of the longest lawsuit in the history of love.