"This house is ridiculous!"
24
Mace
Josie got lost again the next morning.
"This house is not intuitive at all," she said as I guided her to the bathroom.
I wondered if she would not-so-subtly invite me to join her. I was ninety percent sure that that was what she was doing last night. A part of me wanted to throw caution to the wind and take her up on her offer, but then, she liked to tease. What if she didn't mean it? Would she have been upset if I actually watched her take a shower? I wondered what she looked like standing under the water, her back arched into the spray.
"Did you hear me?" I felt her grab my bicep. Her hand was warm through my long-sleeved workout shirt. "I asked if you wanted me to find a daycare option for Henry, or a nanny?"
I shook my head. "Can you look after him? There are some… complications with his situation."
* * *
I hadto be in the office early, so I left Josie to find her own way. There was a meeting scheduled with Tara and the biomedical engineers and Owen Frost, Jack's brother. He was a wiz at computing and had made billions from cryptocurrency though that was just something he had done for fun.
His day job was being the CEO of a data-analytics and cryptology company. Owen's company was a key partner in my gene therapy product. The whole procedure hinged on quickly, economically, and accurately decoding the genome of a cancer cell and the host patient's own cells then parsing it against other data. Both of our companies' values would skyrocket if this procedure was successfully mainstreamed—or would crash and burn if it wasn't.
"Thanks for making the trip," I said, greeting Owen.
"We cannot afford to have anything go wrong with this gene therapy rollout," he said, shaking my hand. He had the same platinum-white hair and ice-blue eyes as his younger brother, Jack.
Henry was weaving between my legs.
"You coming to the meeting, little man?" Owen asked Henry.
"I like dinosaurs," my little brother said.
I made a helpless gesture. "He's clearly CEO material."
"I'll say! Kicked out of daycare, disrupting meetings—if I didn't know any better, I'd say your company cloned Archer," Owen said with a laugh.
Tara was already in the meeting room with the marketing consultant team. Parker, my brother and chief biomedical researcher, was there too. No one looked that happy except for Tara.
"I want—"
"Hush, Henry," I hissed at him. "Josie will be here for you soon."
Tara pursed her lips but then smiled widely when she saw I was watching.
"We needed to have this meeting," Parker began, "because we cannot have the marketing team making promises about the product and treatment that are unrealistic. I've told Adrian about this."
Adrian shrank down in his seat.
"You haveAdrianrunning this project?" Owen turned to me, glaring.
"He's just my eyes and ears," I assured Owen. "I'm completely in charge."
"He's not," Parker muttered. I kicked my brother under the table.
"Do you all understand the product?" Owen asked, leaning forward over the table. He was a big man and cut an imposing figure.
"Of course we do," Tara assured him. Parker snorted derisively. "I told them I could handle it without wasting your time," Tara said to me.
I stopped her. "It's not a waste of my time. This product could make our company billions of dollars or completely ruin our reputation if it goes south. It is critical that this therapy launch correctly."
