Anytime. That’s what family’s for.
I stare at the word for a moment. Family.
Not the people who share my DNA and treat obligation like a transaction. Not the parents who outsourced my childhood and criticized everything I became.
Family is Dominic managing my trusts and fielding angry phone calls. Family is David letting me crash his office to talk about things I couldn’t say to anyone else. Family is Bennett giving me a place where my brain wasn’t a liability. Family is Caleb making terrible jokes until I accidentally laugh.
Family is Audrey, steady and brilliant and inexplicably mine.
I put the phone down and turn back to the simulation data. There’s still work to do—final validation, documentation,the submission package for the FDA. But for the first time in months, it feels manageable. Like a success we can actually achieve.
“Ready to run the next phase?” Audrey asks.
“Ready.”
She initiates the sequence. I watch the data begin to flow—green lights across the board, systems functioning, everything exactly as it should be.
My phone buzzes. I glance at it without picking up.
Mother. Again.
Audrey raises an eyebrow. “Round two?”
“She can leave a voicemail.” I silence the phone and turn back to the monitor. “I have more important things to watch.”
“Such as?”
“You.” I keep my eyes on the screen, but I sense her smile. “Also, the simulation. But mostly you.”
“Still cheesy.”
“The data still supports it.”
She throws a pen at my head. I catch it without looking.
“Show-off,” she says, but she’s laughing, and the simulation keeps running, and my phone keeps buzzing, and I don’t answer.
I don’t have to anymore.
CHAPTER 31
Audrey
“No.” I click refresh. Nothing. Click again. Nothing. “No, no, no?—”
Seventy-two hours until the FDA submission deadline, and I’m staring at a black screen.
“Audrey.” Logan’s voice comes from somewhere behind me, calm and measured. “What’s wrong?”
“The server.” I gesture helplessly at my monitor. “It’s down. I can’t access anything—the validation results, the documentation templates, the submission framework. It’s all just... gone.”
Logan rolls his chair over, his shoulder pressing against mine as he leans in to look. His fingers fly across my keyboard, trying different access points, different pathways. Each one returns the same error message:Connection failed. Server unavailable.
“It’s not just your workstation,” he says, pulling out his phone to check something. “The whole system is offline.”
“How is that possible? We have redundant power. We have backup generators. We have?—”
“Hardware failure, maybe. Or a cascade issue in the cooling system.” He’s already standing, moving toward his ownworkstation to pull up the server diagnostics remotely. “I won’t know until I can see what’s happening on site.”
