Chapter 9

Tom McCarthy

The office smelled like fresh coffee and money, the way it always did on launch mornings.

Floor-to-ceiling glass, city skyline bleeding gold through the blinds, my team buzzing quietly...behind frosted partitions. Everyone moved fast..headphones on, fingers flying over keyboards, voices low and urgent. They knew what today meant.

One successful launch and McCarthy Tech would cross the billion-dollar valuation line. One flawless rollout and the investors would stop breathing down my neck. One clean execution and I’d finally be untouchable.

I sat at my desk, sleeves rolled to the elbows, staring at the final build on my triple monitors. The app looked perfect..sleek UI, smooth animations, metrics green across the board. My product lead, Marcus, hovered near the door, arms crossed, waiting for the word.

“Everything’s locked,” he said. “Servers are scaled. Beta testers gave it 4.8. We’re ready whenever you are.”

I nodded once. “Give me five minutes.”

He left quietly. The door clicked shut.

I leaned back in the leather chair, exhaled slowly, and opened the diagnostic panel one last time. Habit. Paranoia. Whatever you wanted to call it. I never launched without running the deep checks myself.

I clicked Run.

The progress bar crawled. Then froze.

A red warning blinked across the screen.

*Critical dependency conflict detected. Runtime error in core payment module. Transaction integrity compromised.*

My stomach dropped.

I refreshed then ran it again.

Same error. Deeper this time....There was a chain of failures—cascading down from the payment gateway to the user authentication layer. If we pushed live like this, the app would process payments but fail to verify them properly. Money would move.

Receipts would vanish. Users would scream fraud. Regulators would crawl up our asses. And the valuation? Gone. Investors would pull funding faster than I could blink.

I stared at the screen like it had personally betrayed me.

This wasn’t a small bug. This was structural. Someone...probably one of the junior devs...had pushed an untested update to the payment SDK last night. Or maybe it was the new API wrapper Marcus swore was stable. Didn’t matter who. It was my name on the letterhead. My face in every article. My future on the line.

I slammed my palm on the desk. The sound cracked through the room.

Marcus poked his head back in. “Everything okay?”

“No,” I snapped. “Kill the launch. Pull it from the schedule.”

His face went pale. “Tom, the investors are already in the war room. They’re expecting—”

“I said kill it.” My voice was low, dangerous. “We’re not shipping broken code. Reschedule for next week. Fix the damn payment module. And find out who approved the last commit.”

He nodded quickly and disappeared.

I leaned forward, elbows on the desk, head in my hands.

A week.

Seven more days of bleeding cash. Seven more days of watching the stock ticker twitch downward. Seven more days of Emily asking when the money would start rolling in so she could buy another Birkin. Seven more days of pretending I wasn’t drowning.

I thought about Sara.

For one stupid second.

The way she used to sit on the couch late at night while I debugged, barefoot, hair in a messy bun, handing me coffee without being asked. She never understood the code, but she understood me. She’d look at the screen, tilt her head, and say something simple like, “Did you check the auth token refresh?” And half the time she was right.

I shoved the thought away hard.

She betrayed me.

The video was still burned into my brain—her moans, the stranger’s hands, the way she arched like she’d never arched for me.

She didn’t get to be the one I missed.

Not anymore. I stood up, walked to the window, stared down at the city crawling below.

Bad mood didn’t even cover it.

I was furious.

At the bug. At the team. At Emily for being useless. At Sara for ruining what could’ve been perfect.

But mostly at myself.

Because even now—after everything—I still wondered if she’d have caught this before it happened.

I clenched my fist against the glass.

In one week or so. I’d fix it. I’d launch. I’d become the billionaire I was supposed to be. I'd finish the stupid deal, get her out of my life and then I’d forget her name.