Some of these are serious academic texts. The kind that cost eighty pounds each and require prerequisite knowledge just to understand the table of contents.
Did Archie just pick them up at the charity store? Maybe a graduate student cleaned out their textbooks right before Archie just happened to be browsing for solid books?
I scan the spines of the books, and my confusion deepens. There are so many random topics here. Yet nearly all the books have Post-it notes sticking out of them, filled with annotations in the same small, cramped handwriting.
Why would someone who entertains at children’s birthday parties have books on reproductive fitness optimization and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? There’s not a single thriller or mystery book in this stack. So Archie was telling the truth when he said he didn’t read crime dramas. But what he does read provides more questions than answers.
I straighten, glancing around the bedsit with fresh eyes.
I’m starting to get the feeling that Archie Mansley is slightly more than he seems.
And I’m not sure if that makes me more curious or more concerned.
Now that I’ve straightened, I’m eye level with a corkboard. It contains a bus timetable with several routes highlighted, a loyalty card for the Thai place that’s two stamps away from a free entree, and a child’s drawings of a stick figure in a top hat labeledCAPTIN GIGLESin unsteady crayon.
But tucked away in the corner is a photo.
Ignoring the pulse of concern that I’m bordering on snooping, I lean forward to examine it.
The photo is slightly curled at the edges. It’s a picture of a beach. The light is too golden, the water too clear for anywhere in the continental US. It’s a stretch of sand that looks like it belongs in a travel magazine, with a sprawling resort visible on the cliff behind the photo’s subjects.
Two boys are standing in the foreground. The older one has his arm slung around the younger one’s shoulders in a way that’s half-protective, half-showing off, the universal body language of a big brother. He’s tanned, athletic, and grinning at the camera.
The younger one isn’t looking at the camera at all. He’s looking up at his brother, squinting slightly against the sun, with the kind of naked admiration that makes my ribs ache. He’s all limbs, oversized swim trunks, and messy hair, and there’s not a trace of performance in his expression. Just a kid who thinks his brother is the greatest person alive.
I stare at the photo for a long time.
Because the older boy is Vaughn Mansley.
The resort in the background. The perfect beach. The snorkeling gear abandoned on the sand at their feet.
The Mansleys had money, the kind that pays for vacations in tropical places and doesn’t think twice about it.
And their youngest son is living in a bedsit with a three-legged desk and a loyalty card that’s two stamps away from a free pad thai.
I look at the photo again. At Archie’s face tilted up toward Vaughn. His unguarded and trusting expression.
Something cold moves through my chest.
Because I know what it feels like to look at Vaughn Mansley like that. I didn’t quite have a little brother’s adoration, but I had something adjacent—the relief of someone who’d been treading water alone and finally realized they’d found solid ground.
I was twenty-two and fresh out of college with anxiety about whether I was going to make it when I met Vaughn. He wastwenty-five and already fluent in the language of QuantumTech. He knew the politics, the posturing, the unwritten rules that no one bothered to teach me.
He’d sought me out. That’s the part I still can’t fully reconcile. It wasn’t me who initiated the friendship. Vaughn had come to my desk one afternoon, leaned against the partition wall, and said, “You’re the one who flagged that vulnerability in the Chen-Martinez protocol, right? That was sharp.”
No one at QuantumTech had called my work sharp before. I was the quiet kid from Detroit who wore the same two shirts in rotation and ate lunch at his desk because he couldn’t afford the places everyone else went.
Vaughn started eating lunch with me instead.
He’d bring an extra coffee without being asked. He explained the office dynamics, telling me who to pitch to, who to avoid, and why the Tuesday morning standups were actually where the real decisions got made. When I stumbled through my first presentation to the leadership team, sweating through my only decent shirt, Vaughn caught me afterward and said, “Your idea was the best thing in that room. You just need to sell it like you believe that.”
I did believe it. I just didn’t know how to make other people believe it too.
So when I started developing the blockchain security protocol, an idea I’d been turning over in my head since my senior thesis, Vaughn was the person I trusted enough to talk through it with. We spent late nights in the office with whiteboards covered in my diagrams and his questions. He pushed me on the weak points, suggested angles I hadn’t considered.
I thought I’d finally found someone in the tech world who saw past the cheap shirts and the Detroit accent to the work itself.
Then, one Monday morning, I walked into the office, and Martin Zhao from the leadership team stopped me in the corridor.
