Chapter 15
Charlotte
I slumped in the passenger seat of Ty’s truck, the victory high from the advancement on the stabilizer code already fading into bone-deep exhaustion.
Thirty hours. Thirty hours of staring at screens, talking to code, surviving on whatever food Ty brought me.
But I’d done it. The breakthrough that had eluded me for days finally clicked into place, and the relief was almost as overwhelming as the fatigue.
“You still with me?” Ty asked, glancing over as he navigated out of the Vertex parking lot.
“Barely.” I let my head fall back against the headrest. “I can’t believe I actually figured out the error rate issue. The inverse quantum state solution was right there the whole time. Still more work to do, but that was the biggest roadblock.”
His smile was warm, proud even, like my breakthrough meant something to him personally. “You were brilliant in there.”
Heat crept up my neck. I wasn’t used to compliments delivered like that—warm and personal, like he was proud of me specifically, not just impressed by the work.
Usually, recognition came in the form of approved grant applications or published papers.
Not from men who looked like they could bench press a small car and still had time to bring me sandwiches at two in the morning.
We drove away from my neighborhood, not toward it, and my tired brain took a moment to process the direction. “This isn’t the way to my house.”
“Nope.” He checked his mirrors with that constant awareness he had, always watching, always ready.
“Where are we going?”
He pulled into a parking lot in front of a restaurant I’d driven past hundreds of times but never entered. Not fancy with valet parking and a dress code, but not a drive-through either. The kind of place normal people went on normal dates.
“You need real food,” he said, turning off the engine. “Not protein bars. Not the sandwiches and energy drinks I’ve been bringing you. An actual meal where you sit down and eat with utensils and maybe even taste what you’re eating.”
“I ate everything you brought me.”
“You inhaled it while typing one-handed and probably didn’t taste any of it.”
He had a point. Every meal for the past thirty hours had been consumed mechanically, fuel for the coding marathon rather than anything I actually experienced.
“That’s what I thought.” He came around to open my door before I could protest. “Come on, Dr. Gifford. Time for a proper meal.”
I wanted to protest, but my body betrayed me, stomach growling at the mere thought of real food. My legs felt shaky as I slid out of the truck, and Ty’s hand found my elbow, steadying me.
Inside, the restaurant was warm and dimly lit, with booths along one wall and tables scattered through the middle.
Not romantic exactly, but comfortable. The hostess led us to a corner booth, and I slid in, suddenly aware of how I must look.
Lab-wrinkled clothes, mostly unbraided hair, the bruise on my cheekbone from yesterday’s accident turning purple-green.
Was this a date? My experience with actual dates could be counted on one hand with fingers left over. This felt like it could be one—restaurant, just the two of us, him insisting on taking care of me. But then, taking care of me was literally his job.
My mind drifted to waking up in his arms after the accident. The way he’d touched me, made me fall apart with such focused intensity. I was hoping for more of that, but evidently, he wasn’t since he’d made it clear back at Vertex that he’d be heading back to his hotel.
“Stop,” Ty said, settling across from me.
“Stop what?”
“Whatever you’re overthinking. You get this little furrow between your eyebrows when your brain goes into overdrive.”
A flush crept up my neck. He noticed my thinking face? “I wasn’t—”
“Yeah, you were.” He handed me a menu. “Here. Pick something with actual nutritional value. And stop worrying about how you look. You look beautiful.”
The last word made my heart skip. Beautiful. Not fine. Not okay. Beautiful. Even exhausted and rumpled, he thought I was beautiful. He’d called me that before.
But still…it could just be a figure of speech. I wasn’t sure.
I opened the menu, but the words swam together. My brain kept circling back to the lab, to his cryptic comment about trusting him. “What did you mean earlier? When you asked me to trust you?”
He looked up from his own menu, those brown eyes steady on mine. “I’m playing a hunch.”
“About what?”
“About our saboteur getting desperate. About them making a move if they think you’re close to finishing.” He set his menu aside. “I’ll let you know if it works out.”
“That’s not very specific.”
“It’s not supposed to be. Let’s just see what happens.” The server appeared, and Ty ordered a steak and vegetables. I did the same—actual food that required utensils and chewing.
When the server left, Ty leaned back, studying me. “Right now, I just want you to relax. Eat a meal. Have a conversation that doesn’t involve quantum mechanics or security protocols.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Sure you do.” His smile was gentle, not mocking. “Tell me something about yourself that has nothing to do with work.”
I fidgeted with my napkin. “There isn’t much. Work is…most of what I do.”
“There has to be something. Family? Hobbies? Secret passion for reality TV?”
“Definitely not reality TV.” I folded the napkin into precise squares. “I was an only child. My mother died when I was three. Car accident. I don’t really remember her.”
His expression softened. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” I unfolded the napkin, started over. “My father raised me. We were…similar. Both better with equations than emotions. He died my junior year at Stanford.”
“That must have been hard.”
“We were on good terms, but not close. Not the way I think fathers and daughters are supposed to be. He was proud of me, I think. In his way. He just never quite knew what to do with me.” I forced myself to stop destroying the napkin. “We understood each other’s minds but not much else.”
The server brought our food, and the smell made my stomach growl audibly. Ty grinned. “See? Real food. Your body knows what it needs.”
I cut into the steak, perfectly medium rare, and nearly moaned at the first bite. “This is amazing.”
“When’s the last time you went on an actual date?” He asked it casually, but I saw him watching my reaction.
I concentrated on cutting another piece of steak, buying time while I decided how pathetic to make myself sound.
“About four years ago. A postdoc from the physics department asked me to dinner. We spent the entire time discussing quantum entanglement theory, and I’m pretty sure he was more interested in picking my brain about my research than anything else. ”
Which had been fine, really. Safer to talk about work than navigate the mysterious waters of actual romantic conversation.
“That doesn’t sound like much of a date.”
“It’s better than the one before that. Conference dinner with a colleague who kept refilling my wineglass while explaining why string theory was superior to loop quantum gravity. I think he was trying to get me drunk enough to agree with him.”
Or maybe he’d been trying for something else entirely. I’d never been good at reading those signals and had escaped to my hotel room the moment I’d realized his hand on my knee wasn’t accidental.
“Wait. How many dates have you been on total?”
“Two. Well, three, if that conference dinner counts, which it probably doesn’t.” I risked a glance up, wondering if he’d laugh at the pathetic number. “This is actually nicer than either of those.”
“This?”
The word hung between us, loaded with possibility. Shoot. Maybe he didn’t think of this as a date at all. Just part of the security detail. Maybe he’d already forgotten what had happened between us in the bed.
“Tell me about your family,” I said, desperate to deflect. “You mentioned siblings.”
He let me change the subject, and I loved him a little for that. No, not loved.
Appreciated.
Appreciated was so much safer.
“Six kids total. I’m number three. Frank’s the oldest—historian, museum curator, has a PhD and never lets us forget it.
Then Donovan, former Army K9 handler.” Something shifted in his expression when he mentioned Donovan.
“Then me. Then Leonard—high school math teacher and proud of it. Annabel’s a midwife, delivers babies and makes us all look at pictures.
Bridget’s the youngest, just finished law school. ”
“All smart.”
“All brilliant, if you don’t include me,” he corrected. “Every one of them has at least a bachelor’s degree. Most have more. Sunday dinners are like academic conferences with better food.”
“But not you?”
He shrugged, but I caught something underneath it. “Didn’t even finish high school with decent grades. Barely scraped through, joined the Army instead of college. I’m the black sheep who shoots things for a living while they’re changing the world with their brains.”
“That’s not true.”
“Which part?”
“The part where you imply you’re not smart.” I set down my fork, needing him to understand this. “Intelligence isn’t just about degrees. You read situations instantly. You know how to keep people safe. You see patterns others miss.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it’s not. It’s just a different kind of intelligence. One that’s probably saved more lives than my algorithms ever will.”
He was quiet for a moment, then asked, “What made you go into quantum computing? Why cryptography specifically?”
“I wanted to protect things. Information. People.” I pushed my vegetables around my plate, searching for the right words. “When you can see all the vulnerabilities in systems, all the ways they can be exploited, you want to build better walls. Stronger locks.”
“Is that why you developed the Cascade Protocol originally? Before you realized it could be weaponized?”