Page 22 of Escape Girl

In my office, I played his message on speaker. “Good morning, Emily. It’s Cal. Your divorce paperwork is ready to be served to Mr. March, and we’ve located him. I want to respect your wishes for distance and not disclose anything you don’t want to hear. However, as he’s moved out of the Bay Area, we should discuss how we’ll serve the papers to him. Normally, I’d recommend a trusted process server who would be discreet. But as Mr. March is now in a different city, we’ll either need to hire someone local there or fly my recommended process server into that town. The second option would be an additional expense for you to approve.

“Call me before the end of today if you want me to fly in my usual server. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll just go ahead and work with a local resource. The good news is, I’m confident we can serve Mr. March within the next couple of days. We’ve identified both his new residence and place of employment, so serving him the paperwork will not be difficult. I’ll speak to you soon.”

Wait. Wait. What?

I played the voice mail again, in case I’d hallucinated the first time.

Bobby had moved to a different city? I’d obviously known that he wasn’t in our condo anymore, but I’d assumed he wasstill somewhere in town. Except for college, he’d never lived anywhere else. I stood up behind my desk, sat down again. I’d last spoken to him—the really bad conversation—at the beginning of August, and he was still in San Francisco then.

In the last six weeks he’d picked up and left town?

Gotten a job?

I snatched my cell phone and scrolled through my list of contacts until I found him. I almost pressed the call button, but luckily my brain started working again just in time, and I dropped the phone on the desk.It’s none of your business anymore.Bobby was free to move about the country, the entire world even, without letting me know. He could spend his time however he wanted without telling me, even though I was dying to know what kind of work he was doing. How did all of this fit in with the virtual escape rooms he was sending me?

A yawning pit opened up in my chest and my left eyelid twitched violently. Without admitting it to myself, I’d thought maybe the virtual escape rooms were a way for Bobby to pull me back. But in the context of his new life changes, it made much more sense that they were a way for him to say goodbye.

Bobby had always been a lot better and more creative at working his way through tough emotions than I was.

Still though, after thirty-three years in the same city and living off a trust fund for his adult life, that was a lot of change for him in six weeks. I did a slow spin in my office chair. Of course, a year ago, my entire life changed in six weeks too.

After that first library date, Bobby and I saw each other constantly. San Francisco was our playground, and oh, did we play. We walked the hilly streets for miles, talking, until my throat was sore and my calves ached. We did picnics in Golden Gate Park and visited every museum we could find. I cheered Bobby on at his chess tournaments, and he helped me make a pro and con grid to compare my different job offers. We ate dimsum in Chinatown four Sundays in a row, saw old movies at The Castro Theatre, and hiked in John Muir Woods.

We kissed. And kissed. And kissed. I was staying at my father’s house, and the renovations at Bobby’s condo stretched through the fall, so he remained a houseguest in friends’ homes. Given these logistical challenges, we couldn’t go further than kissing. I wanted him so badly every cell in my body ached, but I also knew my careful self enough to know that sleeping with Bobby would be a big deal. Something I might not bounce back from. What if I fell into that abyss and Bobby wasn’t in as deep, emotionally, as me?

So no sex, but we made out like teenagers every freakin’ day.

One afternoon we snuck a bottle of wine into a movie theater showing a revival ofCasablanca. We sat in the back row of a 3:00 p.m. showing on a Tuesday, and we had the theater to ourselves. We kissed until I was shaking from head to toe and begging in his ear for more. Bobby bit my neck and slipped his hand inside my jeans and I—

“Your 10:00 a.m. is here,” Rosie called, knocking on my door.

“C’mon in,” I called, fanning myself and hoping I wasn’t visibly sweaty. Stupid, stupid escape rooms. My libido had vanished the moment I’d fled San Francisco, and I did not welcome its return.

Bella walked in and sat down at the conference table. She wore another oversize cardigan sweater, this one ivory, with cropped jeans and worn boots. “Good morning.” She sounded nervous, probably wondering if this whole week had been a waste of her time.

My 3:00 a.m. insomnia time had been particularly stressful the night before. My brain exhausted itself fighting first-date memories and crafting carefully worded memos to the partners, explaining this very not–Emily Austin decision.

I joined her at the table. “I’m going to take your case,” I said, putting her out of her misery. “Pro bono. If you want to take on Taggert, I’ll be your partner.” Her mouth dropped open, and her eyes went shiny.

But now, for the bad news. “You need to realize that we don’t have a good shot, Bella,” I added quickly. “It’s likely you’ll end up in the exact place you are now. Possibly worse if this goes to court and they fight dirty. You could be the victim of negative, embarrassing press. Everyone talks about the world getting more progressive, and in some ways it has. But people still love celebrities, and they still love sex scandals. The fact that you did nothing wrong by sleeping with Taggert is not going to matter to trolls on social media.”

Her happy expression faded into worry. She bit her lip and looked out the window.

Might as well give her all I had. She’d need it to make an informed decision. “I have a theory,” I announced, yanking her attention back. I pulled out the cease-and-desist letter and the design document of TowerWizard.

“The fact that Taggert has a copyright registration is our biggest problem.” She nodded, lips turning down at the corners. “Particularly because he had filed it months before he met you.” I’d checked, and it was a valid registration made eight months ago for the source code of an administrative console to work with GuardTower. All bad news.

But, the cease-and-desist letter had not included a copy of the actual copyright application, including any snippets of the actual source code. Any decent lawyer would argue that disclosing actual code may expose trade secrets, but in this particular scenario and timing, it also would have ended any claim that Bella had that the code was originally hers.

“I think Taggert’s company was probably working on a similar product to the one you created,” I explained. “Theywere creating their own version of TowerWizard, and they copyrighted their source code. He probably intended to sell it.

“But then…” I looked straight at her. “One night at a tech conference, he meets a young woman who opens her laptop and shows him a much better version of the same type of product.” I grinned at her. “Your TowerWizard probably kicked his product’s ass.”

This was all speculation, of course, but it made so much sense. “Now, if you were intending to sell yours too, maybe he wouldn’t have worried. Because his company has a lot more marketing dollars and all that.”

Bella nodded slowly. “But I was going to release it free…”

“Exactly.” I shrugged. “If your competitor product was superiorand free, his product would be dead in the water. Who knows how much time and money he’s spent developing his? How much in projected sales he was expecting to make? That’s all heavy incentive for theft.”

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