Chapter 29
OLIVIA
When I get out of the Uber, I see that John’s rental car is not in my parents’ driveway.
While I was at the gym, I got a text from him saying that he’d be out for a couple of hours, but he has something important to talk to me about when he gets back.
We’re supposed to leave tomorrow morning and spend tonight with my family.
I didn’t sit down to breakfast with my parents, claiming I had to get to the gym as soon as possible to use the sauna, but I am eighty-five percent certain that my parents didn’t hear Johnny and me boning last night. I can live with those odds.
Probabilities! snaps Johnny’s voice in my head. Probabilities are given as percentages—odds have a value of zero to infinity and represent a ratio!
I may have caught the nerd virus.
When I get upstairs to my former bedroom, the door is open and the puppy is on the floor, splayed out across John’s briefcase, chewing on paper.
“Bob! No!” I pick up the dog, sit on the bed, and wrestle the notebook from his mouth. “No. Bad boy.” I kiss his furry little face when I’ve freed the notebook from it. “Oh my God, you are so cute—but bad boy. No!”
What even is this?
I recognize Johnny’s chicken-scratch handwriting immediately. There are lists. I can make out words like schedule optimization, resource allocation, risk-mitigation strategies. There’s a page marked Decision Tree.
Bob whimpers and slides around on something next to me on the bed, and I realize he’s stepping on the keyboard of John’s laptop. It wakes up the computer. I grab the dog again, but I can’t believe John would leave his laptop open like this.
As I scan the monitor…I can’t believe what I’m seeing there, either…