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“Look who finally made it home,” she says.
“Daddy!”
Babs bursts out from behind a blanket wall the second she sees me, nearly tripping over the edge of it in her rush to get across the room. “We caught him.”
Biddy appears right behind her and points toward the center of the fort where Sprout is sitting with half a grilled cheese hanging from his mouth. “He stole our lunch.”
Sprout wags his tail, sending a chunk of grilled cheese tumbling onto the carpet before looking up at us with complete confidence.
Considering the amount of evidence currently hanging from his face, confidence seems ambitious.
“He ate mine,” Babs says.
“He ate mine too,” Biddy adds. “He didn’t even ask.”
“That’s rude.”
Mom lifts her wine from the armchair where she’s been enjoying the show from a safe distance. “The defense would like it noted that the accused remains extremely adorable.”
Sprout dives for the fallen cheese.
Babs gasps. “Daddy, look!”
Biddy throws both hands into the air. “He’s doing it again.”
The dog swallows the evidence before anyone can stop him.
I loosen my tie while Sprout trots over and sits directly beside me, apparently deciding proximity to the judge is a winning legal strategy.
I close the last email on my screen and glance toward the clock on the corner of my desk.
The twins have been asleep for over an hour, Sprout is stretched beneath the kitchen island with his paws twitching through whatever dream currently involves food theft, and Mom headed to bed after delivering a twenty-minute lecture on why six-year-olds don’t require access to permanent markers.
The penthouse should feel peaceful.
Instead, Emma Love’s hiring file is open in front of me.
HR sent the approval request twenty minutes ago. Since then I’ve reviewed exactly none of tomorrow’s schedule, answered none of the messages waiting in my inbox, and read the same line in her file often enough to qualify as a concerning hobby.
The cursor blinks beside my name.
All I have to do is approve it.
On paper, the decision should be easy. Emma has strong references, relevant experience, and one of the best interviews I’ve seen in months. If she’d been anybody else, I would’ve approved the request before HR finished sending it.
Instead, I find myself reading through her résumé again, searching for a problem that isn’t there.
The problem has never been her qualifications.
It’s the fact that Emma stopped being easy to think about the night I walked into a dressing room and found her trying to hide tears behind a smile.
Years have passed since then, yet seeing her sitting across from me this afternoon unraveled far more than I’d like to admit.
I lean back in my chair and rub a hand across my jaw while the approval request waits patiently on the screen.
Every instinct I’ve spent years developing tells me that bringing Emma into my company, my building, and my daily routine is a terrible idea. Those instincts have kept people safe, protected my family, and helped me build an entire career around identifying trouble before it arrives.
I don’t write code. I never pretend I can. My engineers build the software. My investors fund the vision. What I bring to Wolf Shield is fifteen years of watching security fail in real time. I know where people make mistakes.
