CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
She got there before the line had gotten too long, just like she usually did three mornings a week.
It was part of her morning routine, and she’d been keeping it for nearly three years now.
The baristas all knew her and she always placed the same order.
And when it was available (which it usually was), she took the same seat by the window, angled so the sun wouldn't hit the counter and force her to squint at her phone.
The espresso came first, then the lemon Danish.
She made the same order every time because consistency mattered.
It was the one thing she trusted more than anything else in the world.
Numbers didn't waver just because someone was tired or scared or lying to themselves about how they felt. Numbers told the truth, whether people wanted to hear it or not.
Her phone buzzed against the table before she'd finished her first bite. It was a push notification, then a text from someone on the team, then another. She opened the video that was attached to both without reading either of the messages.
Dr. Elliot Sloan's face filled the screen, backlit by the glass wall of his office, his voice smoothed into something that sounded almost gentle.
She watched him talk about burdens and gifts, about a countdown people had turned into a challenge instead of information.
And with each and every word, she felt something in her chest tighten.
He wasn't wrong about the panic. He wasn't wrong that people had made a game out of something sacred. But he was wrong about the rest of it. More than wrong, it felt dirty. It felt so stupid. It made her hand go still around the paper cup pressing little indentations all around it.
Effective immediately, I'm suspending the predictive peak algorithm.
She set the phone face-down on the table and looked out the window at the street instead. She watched a man walking a dog past the bus stop, then looked at two women across the way, sitting in front of a small bakery and chatting about something.
She watched all of this, but her mind could not be distracted.
Three years of her life sat inside that model…
of catching the small errors before they became large ones.
Three years of tuning and retuning, something that finally, finally told people the truth about their own bodies instead of the comforting lies their doctors handed them at annual physicals.
And Sloan was going to shut it off because a handful of people couldn't handle what the truth looked like on a screen. When it was spelled out and presented in irrefutable data, apparently things just got too damned real.
His little video message wasn't the part that worried her.
Sloan turning off a feature was a business decision, and she understood the logic behind it.
His little move was reversible, the kind of thing a board could walk back in a week once the news cycle moved on to something else.
What worried her was the calendar invite she'd seen yesterday afternoon, the one he hadn't bothered hiding from anyone with admin access, blocking off an hour next week for something labeled Public Statement — Full Model Review.
Whatever it was for, it had been booked at a conference center downtown with press credentials already requested.
He wasn't going to stop at pulling a feature. He was going to stand in front of cameras and call the whole model flawed. She just knew it. At the smallest bit of pressure, when the world wasn’t smelling like roses and sunshine, he was going to show just how big of a coward he truly was.
He would call it dangerous. He may even call it flawed or ill-conceived. Or a fraud, the same word Bryce Tanner had been throwing around for a year, except coming from Sloan it would carry the weight of a confession instead of an accusation.
She thought about the users who'd crossed their peak and kept going, the ones whose bodies had simply refused to follow the curve the way they were supposed to.
Every one of them was a small tear in the fabric of something she'd spent years proving true.
She hadn't started out thinking of it as correcting anything.
It had felt, the first time, like closing a data gap, like reaching into a spreadsheet and fixing a row that had been entered wrong.
Renata Pike's numbers had said one thing and her heart had kept insisting on another.
And as far as she was concerned, that couldn't be allowed to stand.
Not when the model had been so precise about everyone else.
Gerald Mott had been the same kind of error, an outlier who wanted to argue with math.
She'd stopped thinking of their names after a while and started thinking only of the correction itself, clean and necessary—the kind of work that didn't show up anywhere on a performance review but mattered more than anything else.
Hartley had been easy. She'd built his access herself, routed it through his own maintenance script months before she ever needed it. She’d viewed it as sort of the same way you'd plant a spare key under a mat you'd never actually use unless something went wrong.
When Gift and her partner started circling the model team, she'd handed them exactly what they wanted to find: nine single-user queries under a login that had never touched individual predictions until she'd made sure it had.
It cost her nothing, and it had bought her weeks. Perhaps more.
And it had felt, if she was honest with herself, a little like elegant engineering. It had been no more than redirecting a system under load toward the path of least resistance.
But Dr. Sloan wasn't a data engineer with a grudge she could route attention toward.
Sloan had built the thing in the first place.
Sloan had a diagnosis his own doctors had missed for months, a body quietly failing in ways traditional medicine hadn't caught until it no longer mattered.
And instead of understanding what that proved, he'd decided it meant the whole system was broken.
It didn't occur to him that maybe his physicians were the failure, not her model.
It didn't occur to him that a man standing on a stage discrediting the only tool that might have caught his own illness in time was the strongest argument for keeping it running.
Of course, he had no idea that she knew about his illness. It made sense. She was pretty sure it was the sole reason he was thinking so irrationally.
She finished the last of the danish and wiped her fingers on the napkin, folding it once before she stood.
It would be simple, in the end. Simpler than any of the others, because nobody would spend more than a day questioning it.
A man that sick, that exhausted, collapsing under the stress of a company falling apart around him...
well, surely no one would question why he died.
Especially not in the days afterward when the news of his diagnosis reached public ears.
Nobody would look twice. She had building access at every hour of the day, badge credentials that raised no flags, and a reputation as the one person at Apogee who'd never once given anyone a reason to doubt her.
She picked up her cup and stepped toward the counter to drop it in the bin.
"Have a good one, Tessa," the barista called after her, already turning to the next customer in line.
Tessa Kline lifted a hand without looking back, pushed through the door into the morning light, and started walking toward the office, already thinking through the shape of one last correction.