THE GHOST INVENTOR SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 4: The Floor of the Server Room

The empty number never answered. I stared at the word Read until the sky outside my window turned grey, and then I gave up and went to find my father-in-law.

Philip was in the kitchen at six in the morning, alone, drinking black coffee and staring at nothing. He always got up early when he was worried, which meant he hadn't slept in late for about a year.

"Dad," I said. "Can I talk to you? Just us."

He looked up, and for a second, his tired eyes showed something like guilt. Then it was gone. "If it's about last night, Owen, Helena shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry."

"It's not about the wine. It's about Sentinel."

His face closed like a door. "Not this again."

"Please. Just listen for one minute." I sat down across from him, keeping my voice low. "I looked them up last night. Sentinel says it has three hundred employees, but I can't find more than a handful of names. Their address is a shared office in Halbrook. Their client list is full of companies I can't find anywhere. Dad, something about them is wrong."

"You looked them up," he repeated slowly. "On what? That old laptop of yours?"

"Yes."

"Owen." Philip rubbed his eyes. "Ryan has a whole team of lawyers checking this deal. They've seen the government papers. They've seen the money. What did you see? A website?"

I couldn't tell him the truth. I couldn't tell him I'd walked through Sentinel's locked rooms like a ghost through a wall. A man who fixes printers upside down doesn't get to say things like that.

"I just have a bad feeling," I said.

"Is this about the scan?" Philip asked suddenly, narrowing his eyes. "You've always been strange about doctors, Owen. Helena says you won't even get a flu shot."

"It's not about me," I lied.

"A bad feeling." He almost laughed, but it came out sad. "In fourteen days, we lose everything. The company my family built. Two hundred jobs. This house. And you want me to stop because of a bad feeling?"

"Thirteen days now," I said quietly.

He stared at me. Then he stood up, poured the rest of his coffee down the sink and picked up his coat.

"Stay out of business you don't understand, Owen," he said, not unkindly, just tired. "The final signing is at the gala at the Crestport Grand Hotel. It's happening. Please don't embarrass this family any more than you already have."

He left without another word. I sat alone in the kitchen with the hum of the fridge.

By ten o'clock, things got worse.

I'd come into Tan Dynamics early for once, because I couldn't stand being in the house. The office was an old twelve-floor building at the poor end of Glass Valley, with a lobby that smelled like old carpet and a lift that only worked on Tuesdays. I was sitting at the IT desk on the third floor when the whole floor went quiet.

Then Ryan Sato's voice cut through it, sharp and nervous, from the big meeting room.

"Pulse is down again? How long?"

"Forty minutes," someone said. "St. Agnes lost their whole patient records system. Dr. Reyes is on the line. He's furious."

St. Agnes Hospital Network was the largest hospital group in Crestport and our biggest client. Pulse, our hospital software, ran their patient records, their medicine schedules and their surgery lists. When it crashed, doctors couldn't see who was allergic to what.

I got up and drifted toward the meeting room door, holding a bundle of cables so I'd look busy.

Inside, Sophia sat at the head of the long table, her phone on speaker, her face pale but calm. Ryan paced behind her. Jason leaned against the wall, scrolling his phone as if this had nothing to do with him.

"Ms. Tan." A man's voice came from the phone, deep and angry. "This is the third crash this month. Last week, one of my nurses almost gave the wrong medicine to a child because your system showed someone else's chart."

"I understand, Dr. Reyes," Sophia said. "We're working on it."

"You've been working on it for a year. Fix it, or I cancel our contract at the end of the month. I'm sorry, but I can't risk my patients for your family's software."

The line went dead with a sharp click.

Sophia closed her eyes for a long moment. Then she turned to Ryan. "How long to fix it properly? Not patch it. Fix it."

Ryan stopped pacing. "Honestly? The whole core is old and messy. My engineers say a full rebuild would take three months."

"We don't have three months. We have until the end of the month."

"Then we'll keep patching," Ryan said, too quickly, and he didn't meet her eyes.

Jason looked up from his phone and spotted me in the doorway. A slow grin spread across his face.

"Hey, everyone, look who's here," he said loudly. "Mr. Printer himself. You know what I heard, Sophia? Last night, someone on the night shift was messing with the server room. And this morning, Pulse crashes. Funny, right?"

"I didn't touch anything," I said quietly.

"Sure you didn't." Jason pushed off the wall and walked toward me. "Tell you what. If you're so innocent, go make yourself useful. The server room floor is filthy. There's dust everywhere. Dust kills computers, everybody knows that. Go clean it."

"Jason," Sophia said, "this isn't the time."

"It's the perfect time." Jason grabbed a bucket and a brush from the cleaning cupboard in the hall and pushed them into my chest. "Hands and knees, Printer. Right now. In front of everyone, so they can see somebody around here is fixing something."

Somebody at the back laughed nervously. The intern stared at the floor.

The whole floor was watching. Twenty engineers, three secretaries and the intern who made coffee. Nobody said anything.

Sophia looked at me for a second, then looked back at her laptop. She didn't stop him.

So I knelt down on the cold tiles of the server room, behind the glass wall where everyone could see, and I scrubbed.

Jason stood by the glass and filmed me on his phone, laughing. People drifted past and stared. Someone took a picture.

I kept my head down and kept scrubbing. And while my hands moved the brush back and forth, my eyes moved over the big screen on the wall, where Pulse's error logs were scrolling past in red.

Line after line after line. Every crash, every lost record, every time a child's chart had shown the wrong name.

I could see the problem. I could see all of it at once, the way you see a whole puzzle from above. The core of Pulse wasn't old and messy. It was broken at the root, and no amount of patching would fix it.

But I could rebuild it. Not in three months.

In three nights.

My brush stopped moving, just for a second.

Behind the glass, Jason was still laughing at his phone. Ryan was still telling Sophia that patches would hold. Nobody in that building knew that the man on his knees in the dust could save their company before the weekend.

I dipped the brush back into the bucket and kept scrubbing.

Thirteen days to stop a trap. Three nights to rebuild a hospital system. And not one person on earth could ever know it was me.