Every night, while others rushed past her, she studied the glowing screens, memorized patterns, listened to conversations she wasn’t meant to understand. At home, on an old secondhand laptop, she had taught herself to code—line by line, mistake by mistake, through endless nights of trial and error.
And now, as she stared at the cascading errors on the monitors, something in her chest tightened.
She had seen this before.
Not here—but on her own computer, weeks ago, when a system she had built for practice had started behaving the same way. Back then, it had taken her three sleepless nights to find the cause.
Now, the pattern was unmistakable.
Her heart pounded. Her hands felt cold.
She looked at her father, Michael Parker, standing near the door, gripping his cleaning cart, his face full of worry—not just for the company, but for his job, for their life.
Then she looked at Ethan Carter.
For the first time, she saw not a powerful CEO, but a man on the edge of losing everything.
Something inside her pushed forward.
“Excuse me…” she said, her voice soft but steady. “I can fix it.”
The room went silent.
Dozens of heads turned. Some confused. Some irritated.