One letter at a time until the message field was blank again.
I dropped the phone face-down on the coffee table, severing the connection before I could betray us both.
You don't get to keep someone like Alex.
If you love him, you let him go.
And I cared enough to disappear.
"You're better off without me," I whispered to no one.
The silence swallowed my words. I lay back, fully clothed, eyes open, watching shadows shift across the ceiling as cars passed outside. Not sleeping. Just... existing. Waiting for morning to arrive with nothing to wake up for.
Chapter ten
Alex
Thenumbersonmylaptop screen blurred together as I pressed the heels of my hands against my burning eyes. Three in the morning, and I'd entered another web of research topics, with the glow of the screen being the only illumination in my apartment.
I hadn't meant to spend hours digging into Reeves-Halvorsen Technologies. I'd started with a simple search about Lars Reeves that spiraled into corporate filings, press releases, and archived interviews. Now, my coffee had gone cold beside me, and my spine ached from hunching over my keyboard.
A sidebar article had caught my eye—something about military subcontractors. I clicked, and a new world opened up. Reeves-Halvorsen had been expanding aggressively into defense technology, cybersecurity, and something called "preventative threat neutralization."
A transcript from a 2017 technology symposium made me sit up straighter. Lars Reeves had floated the idea of "applying ethics to preemptive safety automation" — a chilling euphemism for developing AI systems capable of identifying "potential threats" and authorizing deadly force before a crime could occur. He called it Project Asphodel.
The Defense Department request for proposals I'd found earlier mentioned "autonomous decision architecture." That was military-speak for machines that could choose their targets.
Marissa and I had stayed up late one night debating the ethics of surveillance technology. She'd been passionate about the topic, insisting that technology could never replace human judgment. I felt her presence near me, hovering over my shoulder, reading faster than me, and connecting dots in patterns I couldn't yet see.
"You'd already have a theory, wouldn't you?" I whispered to the empty room.
My fingers cramped as I continued typing, bookmarking files and clipping excerpts. The apartment settled around me with familiar creaks—the refrigerator's hum, water pipes contracting, and the building's old bones shifting with temperature changes.
My search history grew—queries about defense algorithms, autonomous response systems, and ethical frameworks for preventative security. With each new search, a shape began to form.
It wasn't clear enough to name, but the picture coming into focus kept me going. It was like searching for the remaining pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
I knew that projects like this always left footprints. People talked at some point, and somebody always took notes.
When I stretched my arms overhead, my back popped in protest. Somewhere out there, I knew Michael was awake, too. It was difficult to explain precisely how I knew, but I was certain I was correct.
Was he thinking about me? Or had he already filed our encounter away as a mistake, a moment of weakness in paradise?
That idea hurt, but I pushed it aside. I had work to do.
I opened a new search window and typed:Evelyn Shaw + Reeves-Halvorsen.
My earlier research turned up publications by her before she joined the firm but nothing after. Barely a year into her work with the company, she abruptly left.
"What were you working on, Evelyn?"
A browser tab flickered without warning. The screen went white, then black. My heart leaped into my throat as a single line of text appeared:
Stop asking questions you don't want answered.
I read it twice before the screen reset, and everything returned to normal—except my pulse, which thundered in my ears. The message wasn't a glitch. Someone had been watching my search patterns and had access to my machine. Someone had reached through the internet directly into my apartment.
I checked my browser history. Gone. All of it wiped clean as if I'd spent the night staring at a blank screen instead of digging through corporate archives. I tried to take a screenshot, but nothing worked. The laptop fan whirred frantically.
