The letter was one page.

*Dear Ms. Chen, effective immediately, your employment with Apex Technologies is terminated. Your equity position is subject to the provisions of Section 12(b) of the co-founder agreement, which grants the remaining board the right to repurchase unvested shares at par value in cases of...*

I stopped reading.

I knew what Section 12(b) said. I had read the co-founder agreement twice before I signed it, and I had spent the last six months watching Marcus Vail position the board to use it.

I put the letter on my kitchen table.

Drew was sitting across from me.

He was looking at the table.

"You knew," I said.

He looked up.

"Quinn—"

"How long?" I said.

He looked back at the table.

That was my answer.

My husband — the other co-founder, the one with the business degree and the sales instincts and the ability to be in a room with investors without making them uncomfortable with specificity — had known that Marcus was going to do this. Had known, probably, before Marcus had done the paperwork. Had let it happen.

"The board voted," he said. "I was one of four votes."

"You were one of four votes," I said.

"Quinn."

"How did you vote?" I said.

He didn't answer.

I picked up the letter. Folded it along its existing crease. Put it in the pocket of the jacket I was still wearing because I'd walked in the door and sat down at the table and Drew had been waiting.

He'd been waiting at the table.

He'd known.

"I need you to tell me one thing," I said. "Honestly."

He looked at me.

"The compression algorithm," I said. "Section 7 of the IP agreement. The AI assigns ownership of all co-founder-developed IP to the company."

"Yes," he said. Quietly.

"Who decided to put that clause in?"

A long pause.

"Marcus drafted the agreement," Drew said.

"Before or after I'd shown him what I was building?"

Another long pause.

"After," Drew said. Barely audible.

I stood up.

"Okay," I said. "Then I know what I need to know."

I went to the bedroom.

I packed what I needed — not everything, just what I'd need for the next month. The rest I could get later or replace.

I came back through the kitchen with the bag.

Drew was still at the table.

"Quinn," he said.

"I'm not angry," I said. And I meant it, which surprised me. "I'm going to be angry later, probably. Right now I'm just — I'm done." I looked at him. "We're done."

I walked out.

Outside, I called my best friend Lena.

"I need a couch," I said.

"For how long?" she said.

"Long enough to rebuild a company," I said.

A pause.

"That could be a while," she said.

"Yes," I said. "I know."

"The couch is yours," she said. "Come over."

I went over.

I sat on Lena's couch and looked at the wall and felt something settle into place. Not peace. Certainty.

Marcus Vail had taken the compression algorithm I'd spent two years building. The board had let him. Drew had voted with them, or hadn't voted against them — the result was the same.

I was thirty-one years old and I had three years of work inside me that I'd expressed in code, and the code was inside Apex Technologies, and I was not inside Apex Technologies anymore.

The code was mine.

I couldn't prove it yet.

But I knew what I'd built and I knew what I'd build next and the next thing was going to be better.

I opened my laptop.

I started.

The laptop was already open on the kitchen table.

I had not put it there. I had come in with the letter in my hand and sat down and Drew had been waiting and the conversation had taken four minutes total, and now I was leaving with a bag and the laptop was still open on the table showing the last thing I'd been working on before I'd gone to the office that morning.

A branch of the codebase.

The compression optimization I'd been developing for six months.

The work that now belonged to Apex Technologies.

I stopped at the door.

I looked at the screen.

The branch would be wiped from my access by end of business. The commits were in the Apex repository, which I no longer had rights to. The documentation was on the Apex servers.

I had the knowledge in my head.

That was the one thing Section 12(b) couldn't take.

You could assign IP. You could repurchase equity at par. You could revoke access and change the locks and have security escort someone out of a building.

You could not revoke the understanding of why you built something.

That was mine.

I closed the laptop.

I picked up my bag.

Drew had not moved from the table.

"The divorce attorney," I said. "I'll contact mine by the end of the week. We can keep it clean."

He looked at me.

"Quinn—"

"I'm not asking you to explain," I said. "I understand what happened. I want us to handle the rest of this cleanly so we can both move on." I held his eyes. "Can you do that?"

He looked like a man who had many things he needed to say and understood, correctly, that none of them were appropriate right now.

"Yes," he said.

"Thank you," I said.

I left.

On Lena's couch I opened the new laptop I'd been planning to buy for a month, still in its box in the corner of her living room because I hadn't gotten around to it.

I got around to it now.

I booted it up.

I opened a new repository.

Empty.

I named it Nexus.

I wrote the first line.

The work was beginning. The first commit was pushed at 11:42pm. The repository had one file. It would have millions. Quinn Chen was building. She was thirty-one and she had the algorithm in her head and she had a repository named Nexus and she had work to do. She started.