“Thank you, I appreciate it,” he said. “But I should go.”
“Come on, sit down. At least for a minute. If the FBI knew that you were here, wouldn’t they have caught you by now?”
He frowned. “Yeah...”
Marty seemed to debate this for a moment before finally closing the door and taking a seat on the couch.
Claire let out a sigh. She wasn’t ready for him to run out of her life yet.
She busied herself with getting the leftovers onto a plate. In truth, she’d only taken one bite of her meal. She’d hoped that Marty would still be there when she got back, and purposely ordered something that would reheat well – a fisherman’s pie.
Before he could protest any more, she popped the plate into the microwave and pulled two sodas from the fridge.
“It’s a misunderstanding,” he said taking a sip of the soda.
“What is?”
He cleared his throat. “With the FBI. I’m not dangerous or anything.”
“Of course you’re not,” Claire said with a smile. She pulled the plate out of the microwave and set it on the small kitchen table.
“Did the FBI tell you why they wanted to talk to me?” he asked, standing up.
Claire shook her head. She was trying not to pry, even though she’d been hit with a second wave of urgently wanting to know everything about him. “They just accused me of lying. I had no idea what they were talking about.”
He let out a sigh. “They’ve been led to believe that I was selling secrets to the Chinese government.”
Claire couldn’t help it; she laughed out loud. “That sounds like the plot of the bad spy movie.”
He smiled, taking a bite of the pie. “You’re telling me.”
“Well, that’s just silly! Can’t you just tell them that you didn’t do it?”
“It’s hard. They have evidence that I did.”
Claire took a seat across from him. “Like the evidence they had that I have a son?”
He offered a weak smile. “Yeah, kinda like that.”
A weight lifted from Claire’s shoulders. Though in her heart she didn’t believe that Marty could possibly be a dangerous criminal, it was nice to have it confirmed. Even if it was just by him. “I had a hard time convincing them that I didn’t have a son, so I can only imagine.”
He set his fork down. “Yeah. It’s…complicated.”
“I’d love to hear about it,” she said, smiling at him. “If you don’t mind?”
He stared at her for a moment before continuing. “Okay, ah, I don’t know where to start. I guess it began back in college. I went to school for engineering, but failed out.”
Claire nodded. Lucy had followed a similar path, but she didn’t think that it was the appropriate time to interject that fact.
Marty continued his story. “I was still friends with some of the guys, though, and after they graduated, they started a pet project called SureFired. It’s basically a computer program that can help predict wildfires, and how best to fight them.”
Claire raised her eyebrows. “Oh! How neat.”
“It was,” he said, becoming more animated. “SureFired was really cool. They asked me to help them with it, because I was good at coding – I mean, I’m still good at coding – and I was working at this dumb job as a security guard where I had a lot of free time. Anyway, I helped them get it off the ground and build a company around it.”
“That’s amazing!”
He smiled shyly. “It was, and it started to get a lot of attention. Before long, they had a crazy valuation – like, in the hundreds of millions – and an offer to sell the company.”
