The car came. The penthouse was real. What nobody in that kitchen understood, including me at the time, was that the firm was not hiring a programmer. They were buying one. The transfer notification was the second half of an acquisition. I had spent nineteen months building a compression library alone in that bedroom, and in September I signed it away for eight hundred and forty thousand dollars and a four-year employment clause I did not read closely enough.

My family found out from the street. My mother watched the SUV pull up from the front window and called me eleven times before noon. Delphine sent a photograph of the penthouse windows with three question marks. My father’s message was the shortest and the only honest one: I owe you an apology. He has never given it in person.

I moved across the street because that was the unit the relocation package covered, and because some small vindictive part of me wanted them to see the lights on. That part of me got exactly what it asked for, and it did not feel like anything. I stood at that window for four months watching a house where nobody missed me.

Corbin left Delphine in February. She called me for the first time in a year, crying, and asked if she could stay in my spare room. I said yes before I had decided to. She stayed six weeks. We were kinder to each other than we had ever been, and then she moved out and it went quiet again, and that is where it has stayed.

The four-year clause means I work on other people’s projects until 2029. The library has my grandfather’s initials in the header comment, buried where nobody will ever look. I still have the photograph. Sawdust, workshop, both of us grinning.

He told me giving up is the only real loss. He never mentioned the other kind, where you win exactly what you set out to win and then stand at a window at two in the morning, across a street you can throw a stone over, holding a phone that nobody is calling.