Page 104 of Knot Your Sunshine
Another knock, harder. "Josh?" Keanu's voice, muffled through the door. "Come on, man. I know you're not sleeping. Your light's on."
I stay silent, staring at my laptop screen where code blurs into meaningless symbols.
"Josh, please. Let us in." That's Noa. Of course he's here too.
I wait another ten seconds, making them sweat, before calling out flatly: "It's open."
The door opens and I turn to the window instead of facing them. The ocean stretches endless and dark, moonlight painting silver lines on the waves. Somewhere out there, dolphins are probably still playing. The world keeps turning even when mine has stopped.
"Josh." Noa's voice, closer now.
I say nothing. Let the silence stretch until it becomes uncomfortable.
"I'm sorry."
Three seconds pass. I count them in my head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.
"For what?" My voice comes out deliberately neutral.
"I screwed up. You were right to be angry. My need to control everything... it clouded my judgment, and I made the worst possible choices. I failed as a leader. I failed you."
"M'kay."
"Josh, please." Keanu's voice carries that particular note it gets when he's trying to keep everyone friendly. "Just listen to what Noa has to say."
"Why?" I still don't turn around. "What's going to change? She's gone. We broke her trust. The math's simple: trust broken equals relationship over."
"Except there's no way I'm letting our scent match leave because I screwed up." Noa's voice builds with each word, conviction replacing despair. And despite myself, I find my attention sharpening.
"And what exactly are you going to do about it?" My voice softens slightly, losing some of its edge.
"I don't know yet. Only thing I know is I can't do it alone. Hell, even Keanu and I can't. But with your help... the three of us, there's nothing we can't do." His voice drops. "We need you, Josh. Now more than ever. So we can save our omega's dream... and possibly our relationship with her."
I finally turn. They're both standing there, wearing the same devastation that's been eating me alive. Noa's right. Whatever slim chance we have of fixing this mess, it only exists if we work together.
"You suck, Noa." The words scrape out rough.
My throat closes. I have to swallow twice before I can continue.
"But I'm sorry too." The tension in their shoulders eases slightly. "Nobody forced me to go along with you. I made that choice. This is on me too. On all of us."
The admission burns in my throat, but it's true. I could have spoken up. Could have insisted we include her. Instead, I calculated that the risk of upsetting her was worth avoiding.
I calculated wrong.
But even as I've been drowning in regret, another part of my brain has been working. Finding patterns. Seeing anomalies. Numbers that don't quite add up the way Chadwick presented them.
"I've been digging into the raw franchise data." My voice shifts, gains energy. "The stuff Chadwick's been using for the attribution reports."
I turn the laptop toward them, revealing the chaos on my screen.
"The data is a complete disaster. Every franchisee seems to report differently. Some use daily totals, others weekly. Some include product sales, others just services. No standardization whatsoever." My fingers start moving, pulling up windows, highlighting inconsistencies. "Chadwick's supposedly been turning this chaos into clean reports, but the math ain't mathing. I think we're missing the real story because the source data is deliberately obscured."
Keanu leans in, his reflection joining mine in the screen. "Can you fix it?"
"Already started." My fingers fly across the keyboard, opening my code editor. "I've been building a program to clean it up, standardize everything, make it actually comparable."
I show them the code, hundreds of lines that will parse through the mess, identify patterns, standardize formats, reveal truth hidden in noise.
