Page 61 of Time Stops With You

I yank my hand back. The urge to wash my hands overwhelms me.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell them. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“But we don’t have a…” Sara says.

I’m already out the door. Planting one foot in front of the other, I stumble down the hallway. The closer I get to the main construction area, the harder it is to breathe.

I stop in the middle of the hallway and take in giant gulps of air. The muscles in my shoulders tighten and I squeeze my eyes shut.

You’re going to die a failure, boy.

It’s not a voice I hear often. In fact, I’ve learned to block it out so well that, at times, it feels like that summer never happened. I’d even managed to convince myself those words no longer affect me.

I was wrong.

You think you’re so special? You’re not. You’re just like your old man.

Gritting my teeth, I fish through the chaotic waves of my mind, hunting for solutions. Maybe we go back to the drawing board. Create something completely new. Turn our back on all the years we invested in this interface and come up with something totally different.

No. That’ll take too much time. Time I don’t have. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to live to see the end of the PLP project at this rate, but at least we’ve got light at the end of the tunnel. If I run back to the starting line now…

You’ll die a failure, boy.

I try to unbutton the top of my polo, hoping that’ll help me breathe easier. My fingers tremble too much and I can’t seem to get the button loose.

“Mr. Cullen!” An unfamiliar voice says. A moment later, urgent footsteps pound in time to the hammer sounds thudding across the building.

Someone stoops in front of me. I hadn’t even realized I’d sunk to a crouch against the wall. Blonde hair spills over my arm and a hand with neatly cut nails wraps around my wrist.

“Mr. Cullen, are you okay? Do I need to call the ambulance?”

“No,” I rasp, tilting my head back.

Jenna reaches forward, her fingers close to my neck.

I wrench away.

She stops and gives me a sheepish look. “You seemed to have trouble unbuttoning your shirt.”

“It’s okay.” I twist my body away from her.

She backs off and, only then, do I breathe a bit easier.

“I heard about the PLP duplicate,” she says uneasily, one hand wrapped around her knees. “Are you okay?”

I’m hyperventilating on the floor while a soundtrack from the one and only summer I spent with my drunk of a father replays in my head. I’d say I’m freakingpeachy.

“Yeah,” I answer, not letting any of those words leave my lips. “I just need a minute.”

Jenna either doesn’t hear the ‘go away’ underlining my tone or she does hear but makes a conscious decision to ignore it.

“I can’t begin to understand how you feel, but it must really suck having all your hard work go to waste like that.”

I make a disgruntled sound.

“But,” she stresses, “you’re Ronan Cullen.TheRonan Cullen. You’re the reason I turned down an offer from the biggest search engine company in the world. If anyone can figure this out, you can.”

Her voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Her words are a fast-spreading virus that can wipe out an entire hard drive.

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