Chapter 3
To completely purge the image of that figure staring at an empty seat from my brain, I found myself in Computer Science Building Room 102 at two on Monday morning.
The lab was kept at a constant sixty-one degrees year-round. At this hour, there should have been nothing but the low hum of server fans.
But when I pushed open the door, workstation six glowed with cold white screen light in the corner.
Corbin sat there.
He wasn't wearing that flashy varsity jacket—just a gray hoodie pulled haphazardly over his head. Scratch paper and an empty coffee cup littered his desk.
The scene was deeply wrong. The hockey captain who was usually surrounded by girls at parties, grinding through C++ code at two in the morning.
I moved closer, making no effort to muffle my footsteps.
He didn't notice. He was laser-focused on a senior-level dynamic programming problem on his screen, brow furrowed, jaw clenched tight.
"You're using top-down recursion," I said. "That's going to cause a stack overflow. Your memory's about to blow."
Corbin's head snapped around. When he saw it was me, he froze, then yanked down his hood and dragged his hands down his face. His eyes were completely bloodshot.
"I know it's doing redundant calculations." His voice was hoarse, lacking its usual smooth charm. "But I don't know how to store the states."
My gaze fell on the scratch paper in front of him.
I'd expected messy code fragments. Instead, it was a diagram filled with circles and arrows. It didn't look like a logic flowchart at all. It looked more like...
"Is this a hockey tactical board?" I picked up the paper.
"1-3-1 formation." Corbin pointed at the arrows. "I don't get your abstract concepts, so I'm breaking it down like hockey plays."
He straightened, his fingertip landing on one of the circles. "The puck is the current data, passing routes are recursive calls. If the left wing covers this position, the center doesn't need to move there again. That's 'trading space for time,' right?"
I paused.
No textbook would teach it this way, but using pure sports tactics, he'd nailed the core logic of memoization. Not only was he not stupid—his spatial reasoning was remarkably strong.
"That analogy..." I set down the paper. "Actually works."
It was the first time I'd given him credit.
Corbin's movements stilled. He gave a self-deprecating smirk. "I thought you'd mock me for solving problems like a caveman."
"As long as it compiles, the system doesn't care about methods." I pulled up a chair. "Translate your logic into code. I'll show you how to write the cache."
For the next three hours, the only sound in the lab was keyboard clicks. He learned incredibly fast, and the entire time he maintained a professional distance—purely collaborative.
At five a.m., the code compiled successfully.
"It works." He exhaled deeply and turned to look at me. "Sloane, why are you always so calm? Like nothing can create fluctuations in your system."
"Because data doesn't betray. Give it this much processing power, get this much output." I closed my laptop.
"What if there's a variable that doesn't follow the rules?" He stared intently at me.
"Then you delete it from the core system entirely." I shouldered my bag and headed for the door. "First draft's due tomorrow. Don't be late."
I didn't delete him. Because for the entire month that followed, he disguised himself as an extremely stable piece of code—punctual, efficient, with no boundary violations whatsoever.
The first one to crash was me.
Four weeks later, during the crunch phase for Silicon Valley's Hackathon qualifiers.
This was my only pathway to landing an offer at a top AI company. To refactor the neural network model, I'd been running at maximum capacity for seventy-two hours straight.
The caffeine had stopped working. My heart was hammering in my chest. The code on my retinas was starting to blur.
"Sloane, you have to stop. Your face is white as paper." Liora stood by my desk, her voice sounding distant.
"Just... two more interface validations." I typed mechanically. Each breath sent sharp pains through my lungs.
Just ten more minutes. Ten minutes.
A soft snap. Something broke inside my skull.
Everything went pitch black and deathly silent. I felt my body falling.
In the last second before I lost consciousness completely, I thought I heard a massive bang of a door being thrown open, and someone's distorted shout.
When I opened my eyes again, the sharp smell of disinfectant filled my nostrils. Campus hospital emergency bed, IV line inserted in the back of my hand.
My right hand felt heavy. I turned my head.
Corbin sat in a hard plastic chair, his entire body hunched forward, both hands gripping mine tightly, head buried against the bed rail.
My movement woke him.
His head jerked up—blond hair disheveled, stubble darkening his jaw, still in that gray hoodie. Most striking were those eyes, bloodshot from sleeplessness.
"Sloane?" He croaked hoarsely and jabbed the call button. "Doctor! She's awake!"
He stared at me intently, chest heaving, his grip on my hand trembling slightly.
"What happened?" My voice came out scratchy and painful.
"Your heart gave out and you passed out cold. Cardiac episode." A nurse entered to check the monitors, glancing at Corbin. "You're lucky. Half an hour later and we'd be dealing with more than just some IV fluids. Your boyfriend about damn near broke down the ER doors carrying you in."
I froze. "He's not my boyfriend."
"Whatever you say, but he hasn't left. Been here watching over you for a full twenty hours." The nurse changed the IV bag and walked out, shaking her head.
The room fell silent again.
Twenty hours. My brain struggled to reboot. A forgotten data point suddenly surfaced.
Last night had been the NCAA interstate championship finals—the game that determined whether Corbin would get his NHL draft recommendation letter.
"What time is it now?" I looked at him.
"Thursday, two p.m." He stared back.
"Your scout game was last night at eight." I tried to pull my hand back, but he pressed it down firmly. "You missed it?"
Corbin said nothing, his thumb brushing lightly over the needle mark on my hand.
"Corbin." My voice went cold. "Answer me."
"Yes. I missed it." He lifted his eyes, those crimson irises crashing straight into mine.
"Are you insane?" My heart rate spiked with anger, the monitor beeping rapidly. "You destroyed your career for me? That makes absolutely no sense!"
"Fuck logic!"
Corbin shot to his feet, hands planted on either side of my pillow. Raw desperation and overwhelming presence invaded my space.
"You collapsed without breathing—how the hell was I supposed to be on the ice swinging a stick? How was I supposed to perform for those damn scouts?" His eyes were terrifyingly red, voice shaking. "There's a draft every year! But if you didn't wake up, what good would those trophies do me?"
The room went deathly silent. Only the IV drip falling, one drop at a time.
My fingers slowly clenched beneath the blanket.
Since I could remember, my life had been a precise calculation. I'd learned to measure everything by utility, gotten used to being traded for conditions. I thought the whole world ran on this underlying logic.
But now, this invincible hockey captain had deleted millions in signing bonuses and a dream he'd chased for over a decade like worthless junk code.
No backup plan, no loss mitigation.
Just to make sure I could open my eyes. No algorithm could explain this kind of extreme recklessness.
I should've been angry. But my hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Every wall I'd built with logic and data for twenty years—he'd just bulldozed through it. No calculation, no strategy. Just raw, stupid recklessness.
I took a deep breath and met those bloodshot eyes.
"Corbin." I looked at the dark circles under his eyes and spoke slowly. "Three months."
