12. Ethan
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ethan
Running has always been less about enjoyment than utility.
There are people who claim to love it. People who talk about endorphins, clarity, transcendence, all the vague spiritual nonsense that tends to follow prolonged cardiovascular exertion. I’m not one of them.
I run because it keeps the noise in order.
Because it gives the body something to do while the mind works through problems it’d otherwise keep carrying from room to room as an unpaid debt.
Because some mornings, movement's the difference between functional restraint and becoming intolerable to everyone within a twenty-foot radius.
This morning falls firmly into that last category.
Millennium Park is cold enough to sharpen thought without quite punishing skin, and the city is still in that transitional state between dawn and full wakefulness.
The skyline catches the early light in fractured glass and steel, traffic beginning its crawl around the edges of the park.
Joggers pass in measured rhythms. Cyclists cut through the paths with the usual reckless confidence of people who believe reflective gear makes them immortal.
Somewhere behind me, a dog barks at absolutely nothing.
Chicago, in other words, is functioning normally.
I keep my pace even as I circle the edge of the lawn, breath controlled, shoulders loose, the repetitive impact of my shoes against the path settling me into focus.
It should be enough.
It usually is.
This morning, unfortunately, my brain appears to have decided that instead of thinking about the Zurich review, the revised demo architecture, or the fact that I still need to rewrite my remarks for the investor dinner, it’d prefer to replay the kitchen from last night in unreasonable detail.
A terrible instinct.
The wine.
The low light.
Addy sitting across from me with her hair slightly undone and her guard lowered just enough to become dangerous.
The silence after she mentioned the line we’d already crossed.
The way she said it can’t happen again, as though she were trying to convince herself more than me.
The moment, brief, stupid, avoidable, in which I nearly kissed her.
I lengthen my stride.
That line of thought deserves neither indulgence nor continuation.
She was right to leave.
More importantly, I was wrong to let the conversation reach that point in the first place.
This arrangement works only if the structure remains intact.
She’s good with Oliver. Better than good.
He’s already more at ease with her than he has any right to be after this little time, and Captain has formed what appears to be a full emotional attachment.
The routine is settling faster than I expected. The practical outcome is sound.
That should be the only outcome that matters.
Instead, my mind keeps returning, with steadily increasing irritation, to the way she looked when she stood up from the island, breathless and panicked and very clearly wanting the same thing she was refusing.
It’s not useful.
I check my pace on instinct and adjust half a beat slower, forcing my attention back to the path ahead. The lake air cuts through my lungs cleanly. My pulse settles, becoming harder, steadier.
That helps.
For approximately thirty seconds.
Then my phone vibrates in the zipped pocket of my jacket.
I ignore it.
Whoever it is can wait until I finish the loop.
Ten seconds later, it vibrates again.
Then once more.
I exhale sharply, slow to a stop near a bench overlooking the tree-lined walk, and pull the phone out with the full expectation that this’ll be Sara, Jeffrey, or someone in legal who believes urgency improves before coffee.
It isn’t.
The name on the screen catches me off guard enough that I actually stop moving.
Bee: You alive or did corporate finally eat you?
Bee: Need a favor
Bee: Before you say no, hear me out
Bee: I’m bringing someone to Chicago soon
Bee: New girlfriend
Bee: She likes fancy things and I intend to weaponize that
Bee: Can I bring her to the gala?
I stare at the screen, then laugh once under my breath despite myself.
Only one person I know would refer to impressing a woman as weaponizing luxury.
I resume walking, slower now, scrolling up just far enough to confirm what I already know.
Months since our last conversation. A handful of messages about old code architecture, one exchange about a flight control paper he’d sent me at two in the morning, and before that, another long gap.
Typical of us now. Familiar enough to feel intact, infrequent enough to confirm how far time has moved.
Still, there’s comfort in the rhythm of it.
My oldest friend, technically speaking, though “friend” undersells the specific sort of history involved.
He was there in the beginning.
Before the tower, before the board, before the investors who now talk about Strong AeroTech as though it emerged fully formed from market demand and my apparently singular vision.
He was there when the company still occupied two badly painted rooms and an overworked server rack.
When the original stabilization framework existed mostly as stubbornness, impossible hours, and the kind of optimism that only appears when everyone involved is slightly too young to understand how much could go wrong.
He helped build the first version of what we became.
Brilliant architect. Unstable life choices. Intermittent judgment at best.
Despite that, we've always gotten along.
I type back without slowing entirely.
Ethan: You change girlfriends faster than I change legal teams
Ethan: Wasn’t there someone else six months ago
The reply arrives almost immediately.
Bee: There was
Bee: Then there wasn’t
Bee: It’s a dynamic process
Bee: Also that isn't a no
I shake my head, easing back into a jog.
There was a time I would have known every detail of his personal life by accident. New cities, new women, new interests, each one arriving with enough enthusiasm to make permanence unlikely. He moved through life the way some people flip radio stations.
He left Strong AeroTech not because of any real professional break between us, but because his private life had imploded in some way that made Chicago feel impossible to stay in.
There had been drama, though I never pressed for the full shape of it.
A relationship turned toxic, a need to disappear for a while, a belief that stepping away from the company before it became too large to leave would be simpler than watching it grow without him.
At the time, I understood.
Or thought I did.
I still do, mostly.
I also always assumed he’d circle back eventually, if not to stay then at least to reenter the orbit more consistently.
He never quite did. Consulting here and there.
Independent projects. Too many ideas and not enough patience for infrastructure.
The same mind that had once built some of the most elegant early stabilization logic I’d ever seen, applied now to a dozen things at once because permanence bored him.
My phone vibrates again.
Bee: She’s into planes now because of me
Bee: Tragic but fixable
Bee: Tell me you’ll let me parade her through the ballroom and pretend I’m a visionary
I can hear his voice in the text. That same infuriating, easy irreverence that made long nights in the startup years bearable and board meetings with early investors borderline survivable.
I reply before overthinking it.
Ethan: Yes, you can bring her
There’s a pause this time.
Long enough that I assume he’s either occupied or, more likely, offended by the absence of dramatic resistance.
Then…
Bee: Wow
Bee: That was easier than expected
Bee: Are you alright or has stress finally made you agreeable?
I let out another quiet breath that might almost qualify as amusement.
Ethan: Don’t push it
Bee: Fair
Bee: We’ll make a weekend of it
Bee: Actually…
Bee: I could come up early if you need anything
Bee: Haven’t seen the empire in a while
That slows me a little.
Because yes.
Actually, yes.
There are still architecture issues with the demo sequence I’d prefer another mind on, particularly one that remembers the older framework instincts before scale made everything cleaner, safer, and more committee-approved.
Jeffrey is excellent in the right contexts, and the current team is strong, but Bee has always seen patterns in systems from angles most people miss.
Structural weaknesses. Elegant redundancies.
The way code begins to betray its own assumptions under pressure.
And if he’s coming anyway…
I exit the path briefly to the edge of one of the smaller plazas, slowing to a walk.
Ethan: Come sooner
Ethan: There are a few projects I’d like another set of eyes on
The response is instant.
Bee: There he is
Bee: Knew you missed me
Bee: What kind of projects?
Ethan: AI stabilization demo
Ethan: Some architecture revisions I don’t fully trust yet
Ethan: And gala prep, unfortunately
There’s another beat, then:
Bee: Unfortunately?
Bee: You used to love this stuff
That stops me more effectively than the cold air.
Used to.
He’s not wrong, exactly. There was a period when the gala was less an obligation and more proof that the thing we built had become real.
Back when public presentation still carried the charge of ascent instead of the drag of expectation.
Back when I wasn’t measuring every ballroom by how many times I’d once stood in one with Megan on my arm and thought, briefly, that a future could be stable simply because we wanted it to be.
I type back with the most practical version of the truth available.
Ethan: I love the company
Ethan: The gala is something else
The delay that follows tells me he understands more than he’s choosing to say.
Then:
Bee: Yeah
Bee: Fair enough
Bee: I’ll come up before then if schedules line up
Bee: You can throw impossible systems at me and I’ll insult your current team for sport
I actually smile at that.
Ethan: They’re not impossible systems
Ethan: And you’ll behave professionally in my office
Bee: Absolutely not
Bee: But I’ll try near the investors
That, at least, is the closest thing to a promise I’m likely to get.
I tuck the phone away and start running again, the path curving me back toward the open walk near the park’s center.
Bee coming to Chicago isn’t inherently significant. But it does trigger a familiar sequence of thought.
The old days.
Startup rooms and whiteboards covered in equations.
Megan across the table disagreeing with him on interface assumptions.
The three of us burning through coffee and deadlines and optimism with equal disregard for sleep.
He was never the stable one. Never the one you trusted to remember a meeting time or answer an email before the third follow-up.
But he was brilliant, and in those early years that had mattered more than polish.
He and Megan had always gotten along as well, though their styles couldn’t have been more different.
She was exacting without being erratic, intuitive without abandoning discipline.
He was all impulse, sparks, and architecture built from instinct.
Between them, they made the earliest framework sharper than I could have managed alone.
The first stabilization model we designed together was inelegant by current standards.
It also worked.
Sometimes I miss that stage of the company. Not because it was easier, it wasn’t, but because the questions were cleaner then. Survival. Innovation. Build or fail. No board or gala. No investors who wanted language packaged for sentiment before they’d agreed to fund function.
I finish the last mile harder than I started it, not from any disciplined training instinct but because the body occasionally benefits from blunt force effort when the mind refuses to settle.
By the time I slow outside the apartment building, I’ve stopped thinking about the almost kiss.
Not entirely.
That would be too convenient.