No relationship.
No family events.
No job.
I worked.
Not because I wanted revenge.
At least not consciously.
I worked because code was the one place where effort translated into movement.
A bug did not care that Kate was more loved.
A failing test did not know Nathan had chosen her.
A system either improved or it did not.
Week one became week two.
I built a routine.
Up at seven.
Coffee with Caroline.
Work by eight.
Lunch at noon.
Walk at four.
Back to the laptop until dinner.
Sometimes again until midnight.
Caroline started leaving fruit outside the office door because she said programmers were apparently incapable of recognizing hunger.
Three months passed.
Then one Friday morning, I looked at the software and realized something strange.
It was done.
Not perfectly.
Software is never perfect.
But functional.
Stable.
Tested.
Commercially viable.
I sat there for ten minutes.
Then I called Alan.
He answered on the second ring.
“Diana?”
“Hi.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sound suspiciously cheerful.”
“I finished something.”
“What?”
I told him.
He remembered the project.
“You were still working on that?”
“I finished it.”
“How finished?”
“Can I show you?”
We scheduled a call that afternoon.
I shared my screen.
Twenty minutes in, Alan stopped asking casual questions.
Forty minutes in, he was writing notes.
At the end, he leaned back.
“Who else has seen this?”
“Caroline.”
“Does she know what it does?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I laughed.
Alan became serious.
“I think we can distribute this.”
“We?”
“If you want.”
He proposed an arrangement.
His company would package, market, and distribute the software.
They would cover the commercial infrastructure.
Thirty percent to the company.
Seventy percent to me.
“I want an attorney to review it.”
“You should.”
That answer mattered.
No pressure.
No guilt.
No we’re family.
Just business.
I hired a lawyer.
Read every line.
Asked questions.
Requested two changes.
Alan agreed.
We signed.
Six weeks later, I presented the program at a security technology conference held in a convention hotel.
Two hundred people.
Thick carpet.
Coffee that tasted burnt by nine in the morning.
Badges hanging from everyone’s neck.
I had spoken at developer meetings before.
This was different.
These people understood the problem I had solved.
I could see attention shifting as I demonstrated the system.
People stopped checking phones.
Started taking notes.
Afterward, a representative from a major technology corporation approached me.
“Are you Diana Mercer?”
“Yes.”
“Can we schedule a conversation?”
Two days later, they made an acquisition offer.
Ten million dollars.
I was sitting in the hotel lobby when Alan called.
“Are you sitting down?”
“I’m in a chair.”
“Good.”
He told me the number.
I thought I had misheard.
“Ten?”
“Million.”
I opened the calculator on my phone even though I knew basic arithmetic.
Seventy percent.
Seven million dollars.
I typed it once.
Then again.
7,000,000.
For years, my parents described my work as pressing buttons on a computer.
Apparently, I had pressed the correct ones.
The transaction took time.
Lawyers.
Technical review.