Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

That she’d died alone, and a lot of people had come to her funeral, but no one had cried?

His mother had been a high school teacher. A smart woman, and the most self-centered person Sean had ever met. She’d upstaged him at his middle school graduation, shaking his homeroom teacher’s hand afterward and working the conversation around to her own achievements so quickly that before Sean had even finished checking out his diploma, the teacher was congratulating her on her recent completion of eight credits toward her master’s degree.

Then she’d framed the diploma and stuck it up on the living room wall. One more testament to what an excellent mother she was.

Sean had been seventeen when he figured out that his mom wasn’t “eccentric” or “unusual” or “a little different.” In the waiting room for speech therapy, he’d leafed through a popular psychology magazine and found an article on narcissistic personality disorder. She fit every box in the sidebar’s checklist.

Unable to attend to conversation that didn’t revolve around herself? Check.

Impatient? Check.

Superficial? Check.

Oversensitive? Check.

Short-tempered? Check.

Jenny Owens had been mentally ill, and she’d left no one to mourn her but a son who wasn’t any good at it. When he thought about her, he felt nothing so clean and simple as sadness. He felt bound. Entangled.

No penance would change what had happened between them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have to pay for it.

Sean laced his fingers behind his head, propping his feet up on the desk.

At least Anderson Owens’s problems weren’t the fault of his negligence. They weren’t any fault of Mike’s, either. The issue was straight-up competition. Corporate evolution.

He and Mike had built their business model around Syntek servers because those were the servers they knew how to protect. Those were the servers they knew how to hack. But Syntek lost market share every year, and Anderson Owens no longer had an edge over the competition. In twelve months, they’d given up a dozen big contracts to competitors, six of them in the last quarter.

He needed to come up with a new security product. A quantum leap in technology, an ingenious new idea.

He had bupkis.

Mike stuck his shaved head into the office, a basketball under his arm. “Hoops?”

“Sure.”

“Meet you out there in ten.”

Sean left his pen on his desk, flipped off the light, and walked down the hall to the locker room. He pulled clean workout shorts and a T-shirt out of his locker. Somebody washed the clothes and folded them and put them away; he didn’t know who anymore. In Silicon Valley, you couldn’t skimp on employee amenities. Not if you wanted to have the best employees.

The court was behind the building, at the center of an outdoor track where Sean had put in a lot of hours running and thinking. He looked at the green hills and the valley stretching out below, the blue sky. Fifty-five degrees and sunny. Perfect Southern California winter weather.

None of it felt real.

Mike emerged from the building, and wordlessly they began to play. Their shoes squeaked on recycled rubber. They talked trash, joked around. Kept it light. Sean started to sweat.

Mike raised the intensity, and soon he was slapping at the ball, rebounding aggressively. The game turned mean, but neither of them said a word. Sean took an elbow to the cheekbone and didn’t even consider calling the foul.

Mike had every right to be angry with him.

When Sean’s quads trembled and the back of his shirt had soaked through, Mike abruptly called the game, and they switched to Horse to cool down.

They were on R when Mike asked, “So how long are you staying?”

“I’m flying back tonight.”

Sean sank a free throw, and the ball came right back to him the way it sometimes did on a good shot. He scooped it up and stepped aside, handing it to Mike as he stepped up to the line.

Mike went through his whole free-throw routine. Three bounces. Pause. Another bounce. Some kind of mumbling incantation he’d always done.