Chapter 1

My neighbor Beck Morrow was the best high school point guard this state had seen in years.

The night before the state championship—three college scouts in the stands—he decided to stay home with his girlfriend instead. She wasn't feeling well.

I called his coach.

He played. He got the scholarship. He built a company worth eight figures before he turned thirty, and I spent five years writing every algorithm that company ran on.

He repaid me by throwing a ball at my head during a training session. Then his lawyers sent a letter explaining that I had no legal claim to any intellectual property developed under my employment contract, effective immediately, and that my position was being terminated.

Then I woke up. It was the first week of senior year again.

"Okay, I need everyone to look at him right now."

Cleo Vance had been pressed against the window for the past five minutes, watching Beck run drills on the court below. Half the class had drifted over.

"That crossover? That was insane. And his arms—" She fanned herself. "Someone tell me why I haven't talked to him yet."

"Because you'd actually have to say words," someone said.

"I say words. I say great words." She spun around and pointed at me. "You live next to him. Would he go out with me?"

Something hit me in the chest. Not pain. Pressure. Like a door I'd kept shut for a very long time just blew open all at once.

I pressed my hand flat over my ribs.

I'm back.

The last time Cleo asked me that question, I said nothing.

The day before, she'd picked up my notebook off my desk and flipped it open. The margins were full of Beck's name—different handwriting each time, like I kept trying to find the right version and never did. She held it up for the whole table to see. Everyone laughed.

So when she asked me the next morning, I just sat there with my face going red while people stared, and I couldn't get a single word out. She got her answer anyway.

Everyone knew after that. And everything I did that year, they looked at through that lens.

This time I looked up from my laptop.

"Honestly? I think you'd be good together."

Cleo stared at me for a second. That was not what she was expecting.

I went back to my code.

Beck and I had grown up next door to each other. Not a cute story—just two people in adjacent houses who had both seen too much of each other to pretend. I knew about the time he sat in his truck for twenty minutes before a big game because his hands wouldn't stop shaking. He knew about the night I stayed up until four in the morning on a program that kept crashing, then just lay on the floor when it finally worked because I was too tired to get up.

We weren't the same kind of person. We just spent enough years working in the same direction that it started to feel like something.

Junior year, he said: You get into MIT, I get into the same school on a basketball scholarship. We go together.

I said: I'll build you the best training tools there are. Every win you get, I'll have had something to do with it.

He grinned. Then every trophy has your name on it.

That was the most honest thing I'd ever said to someone. It turned out to also be the dumbest.

Cleo had transferred in at the start of that same year. She had forty thousand followers before midterms—not because she did anything that impressive, just because she knew how to make an iced coffee look like a whole personality. She had a face that worked on camera and the kind of ease that made everything around her feel lighter.

Beck noticed her at the first pep rally. I noticed him noticing.

I got it. He'd been in the gym since he was fourteen—early practices, film sessions, the same routine every day, everything pointed at one goal that was always somewhere in the future. Cleo looked like proof that you could just exist without preparing for something the whole time. For someone like him, that's not just attractive. It's a completely different world.

Last time, it happened in stages.

He started missing practice in September. Not every session—just enough that his numbers started slipping. Coach Harris talked to him twice. Beck said he had it handled.

The night before the state championship—college scouts in the stands, the kind of game that doesn't come around twice—his girlfriend called and said she wasn't feeling well and wanted him there. He called the coach and said he wasn't coming.

I called the coach an hour after that.

Not out of jealousy. I want to be clear about that, even though it ended up not mattering. He was twenty-four hours away from throwing out the only real shot he had, and I'd watched him build toward it for three years. I called someone who could stop it. That was the whole decision.

He played. He was the best person on the floor. Three scouts set up meetings with him before the final buzzer.

He got the scholarship. Good school, good program.

After graduation, he started a company—sports analytics, performance tracking, injury prediction, the kind of data that professional teams were starting to spend serious money on. He had the contacts and the vision. What he needed was someone who could actually build it.

I joined at twenty-three.

Spent the next five years writing the software his company sold to investors. He knew it was mine. He also had lawyers who knew how to write contracts.

Cleo left him around year three. She'd always wanted more than he could give her at that point, and she found it somewhere else. The man she found turned out to be dangerous in ways that didn't show until it was too late.

She died two years after that.

Beck decided the whole chain started with my phone call. I still don't know how you get from a coach getting called to a woman dying in someone else's house. But grief doesn't need a clean line. It just needs somewhere to land.

He landed on me.

During a routine training walkthrough, he threw a ball at my head.

Then his lawyers informed me that I had no legal claim to any work developed under my employment contract, position terminated, effective immediately.

There was a lawsuit. His firm was very good.

It went nowhere.

The last thing he said to me: You wrote the code. The company built something with it. Those aren't the same thing, and they were never going to be.