Chapter 45: Chapter 42: Live. Lie. Repeat.

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“The British blockade is holding, but I have bought passage aboard a Dutch ship bound for New Orleans. If the winds hold, we will make it there in time.”

“So, do you two know what you’re having?” the waiter said as he set down our glasses of whiskey, one with ice and one neat.

“I’ll have the caprese salad to start and then the sea bass for my main,” I said, handing back the paper-thin menu.

“Same,” said Duncan, as if he couldn’t be bothered to give the meal anything more than the minimum amount of attention.

The waiter nodded and shuffled away, leaving us to our drinks and our awkward silence. I finally broke it by clinking my glass against the other one, which had remained on the table, before taking a sip of the cold spirit.

“Ahem,” I said, bringing his attention back to the glass, which he reluctantly took a sip of.

“Look, Dunc, I’m sorry. About standing you up in Paris. About avoiding your calls the last month. About not giving this relationship the attention it deserved. About taking you for gran-”

“Enough,” he said. “I didn’t ask you here to dinner just to hear this pathetic groveling, Jen. I at least owed you the courtesy of a face-to-face breakup after all we’ve been through.”

“I see. So it’s really over.”

“Did you really think otherwise?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. I’m not that dumb. I just thought that after what you had said in Miami that there was still a tiny chance tha-”

“Whatever chance of us staying together evaporated after you couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call me. What was I supposed to think?”

“You’re right. About everything. I should have called you right whe-”

Duncan’s face suddenly froze and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep up the groveling, but I was running out of ways to say I was sorry.

The scheme had been Beatrice’s idea when I told her about the dinner. I was reluctant at first after the fiasco with Lisa and Stacy, but she had assured me that if I used her original short-term serum, I wouldn’t run the risk of another colossal mind wipe. Still, I had reservations. What was the point of confirming my worst suspicions about Duncan if we were just going to break up anyway?

“Because,” Beatrice had said. “You deserve the truth and this is the only way he’ll give it to you.”

So I had shown up 20 minutes early to dinner, ordered us both drinks at the bar, and slid the small ice cube containing a single drop of memory serum inside.

“Don’t hold back,” Beatrice had said. “Every suspicion you’ve ever had, every missed phone call, every half-baked excuse, call him out on it. If he doesn’t give in at first, keep repeating until he does.”

“OK,” I had said. “But … I mean, he did say he wanted to marry me. There must be something there.”

“Do you really think he wanted you to say yes?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Then find out.”

Those words echoed in my head while the serum removed all trace of our conversation from Duncan’s memory. As his unblinking eyes stared off into space, I took advantage of his 60-second incapacitation to let free another drop of serum into the whiskey with the vial I had concealed in the palm of my hand.

“Ahem,” I said, bringing Duncan’s attention to the glass as he came to, and he, again, reluctantly took a small sip of the drugged whiskey.

I played out the conversation the exact same way, except instead of pretending to be resigned to the break-up, I tried a different tact.

“Did you really think otherwise?” Duncan said again.

“Yes,” I said. “Because I believe in second chances and I know you do too. That’s why I want to move to Hong Kong. To be with you. To try again.”

Duncan smirked and then shook his head.

“Too little, too late. Because I’m moving back to New York. And now that we’re no longer together, Jeff is giving me a more active role in overseeing our RPGLab investment. So I’ll be there at tomorrow’s run-thro-”

The serum kicked in again and I re-upped the dose before trying to quickly process what I’d just learned. So instead of exiting my life, Duncan was invading my city and my job.

“Ahem,” I said for a third time and Duncan again took a small sip of the whiskey.

This time, I went on the offensive.

“Who was she?” I asked

“What are you talking about?”

“You drunk dialed me one night last fall. Well, it was night time for you, for me it was one in the afternoon. I picked up and heard you laughing with some woman. Who was she?”

Duncan shifted his eyes around the room before grabbing his glass to take another sip of whiskey, but I folded my hands over his and made him look me in the eyes.

“What? I don’t know what you thought you heard Jen, but I was probably out at a bar with some potential clients. I don’t think you realize how much of our deal flow is based on schmoozing. It’s how we came across your company.”

“I guess I was wrong.”

I treaded water until the serum activated again. Then I repeated the last loop to see if Duncan would tell the same story a second time.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“When did you imagine this happened?” Duncan asked.

“November.”

“So six months ago? If you thought I was cheating on you this whole time, why’d you wait this long to confront me? No, I think this whole thing is you trying to make me the bad guy so you can let yourself off the hook.”

“You’re right. I don’t need to feel bad about not going to Paris because you’ve been cheating on me this whole time.”

“You know, what Jen? Fuc-”

I replayed the conversation six more times, and although each time Duncan reacted slightly differently to my accusations, he never broke down completely and gave me a name. And without that, I was just a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend with a huge paranoid streak.

As I began the ninth go around, the waiter appeared in my peripheral vision, but I waved him away. The last thing I needed right now was for the steady state to be upset by two little cups of gazpacho.

But on second thought, maybe a little chaos was just what this time loop needed.

“Are you going to say anything or are you going to put this all on me?” Duncan finally said after a minute or two had passed without him having taken a sip of whiskey. “I’m not the one who fucked everything up.”

“That’s true. You’re not the one who was sleeping around on the side this whole time. My bad…”

Duncan nearly did a spit take after I dropped that nuke and I worried for a second that the serum wouldn’t take this time around, but I pressed on.

“His name is Garrett. He’s married with a kid. I feel sorry for the wife, but if she can’t please her husband, not my problem. You know?”

“No, I don’t. Listen, if you just came here tonight to rub my face in your unfaithfulness then-”

“I didn’t. Frankly, I had hoped we could both clear the air here tonight and part on equal footing, but if you’re going to insist on claiming that you never strayed, then I guess I have no choice but to believe you.”

“You can believe me because it’s true.”

I was running out of time before the serum kicked in again and still Duncan’s cold-blooded front would not fall, so I went for the hail mary.

“Garrett said you would say that. Said you would hold out until the bitter end before admitting it. But I’ll have to tell him later that he was wrong.”

“You’re something else, you know that? I don’t know what the hell happened to you, but it’s like you’re a completely different person. Seeing as how you’re so eager to jump back into his bed, why don’t you just get out of here?”

“I will, but give me a name, Dunc. I laid all my cards on the table. It’s time you did the same.”

“Fine. Her name is Laura. She works for one of our portfolio companies in Shanghai. And fuck you, by the way, and Garrett.”

I smiled.

“There is no Garrett.”

Duncan opened his mouth to say something but then the serum kicked in, returning the conversation to the beginning of the night once again. But I now had a game-changing arrow in my quiver. As my fake infidelity was wiped clean from Duncan’s mind, I added another serum drop into his nearly-empty whiskey and waited to nock the arrow and let it fly.

Except that moment never came, because no sooner did Duncan come to than my phone did as well.

“911,” the text from Greg read. That meant all hands on deck. Even if those hands had been out sick for the last week, I was still expected to get my butt into the office and help out any way I could.

I clinked my glass against his one more time and downed the rest of my whiskey, and he followed suit.

“Well, this has been great, Dunc, but I’ve got a work emergency to attend to. See you tomorrow.”

“Wait, what? How do you know that?”

Duncan looked at me strangely, trying to process why his whiskey glass emptied so easily and why I knew he was going to be at the run-through. I kicked myself for being careless and started stumbling out an explanation but then realized I didn’t need one.

“You know what,” I said, “on second thought, forget I was here.”

And he did.

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“Make the call.”

I held the phone to my ear as I waited for Beatrice to respond.

“Do you know what time it is?” she said in between yawns.

“It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’ve been stuck staring at a computer monitor for the last seven hours and I just came off of half a speed buff trying to fix some crappy coding my co-workers saddled me with.”

“Right, so why don’t you make the call, since you were already up?”

“Because,” I said, popping a quarter of my last vitality buff into my mouth, “like you said, you’re a known quantity to the Guild.”

“Fine. I’ll call you back.”

She hung up and I felt the revitalization wash over me again.

It had been a maddening all-nighter of pointless tedium up until a few hours ago. I had arrived at the office within 20 minutes of the 911 text only to be put to the extremely important task of checking to see if our code was properly commented. Which, of course, would be the absolute last thing that Jeff and Duncan would either care about or want to see.

I half, no, fully-suspected that the other devs had convinced my boss to call me in because they were annoyed that I’d been excused from fine-tuning the VC branch of the main build the last three weeks. And it certainly hadn’t helped that on top of that, I’d been calling out “sick” all week.

But then at 3:30 I came across a potentially catastrophic error.

“Umm, guys?” I had said to the devs who were working on the other side of the room.

“Not now!” Greg had called back. “We’re finishing something. 30 minutes til we compile the final build.”

Shit.

The error was a relatively simple one to fix. Somewhere along the way, the run-through boss’s signature move had been changed to an overpowered melee attack that would kill everyone in one hit, rather than a spell that slowly drained one player’s hit points while at the same time spreading like a virus to the nearby players, as we had intended.

The only problem was that the original code for the spell was somehow missing from this build. So I had scrambled over to my regular workstation to look through the main codebase only to find it in deep hibernation because of my prolonged absence.

Cursing under my breath, I had trudged back over to the other computer and reluctantly pulled out the speed buff. Rewriting the code from scratch after biting off half of the lilac square had taken a few seconds in real-time, even with my overclocked brain offering up dozens of different options for every decision branch.

But then I had hit a roadblock when I reopened the game to play-test the fix. While my body and mind had gone into hyperdrive, the game was still running at normal speed and so my avatar slowly trudged across the screen as if he were stuck in molasses.

Fortunately, the solution had been obvious and after cranking up the game speed to 50x, my character’s movements had soon matched my relative speed. I soon confirmed that my fix had worked and so I closed the play-test window with a satisfying click and waited for my mind and body to decelerate.

But staring at the code as the seconds ticked off at a glacial pace had made me antsy, so I couldn’t resist combing through the codebase making tiny tweaks where I could. Nothing major that anyone would really notice at the run-through, but it would end up saving me a week’s worth of work on the main build once I was in back in the office.

I had thought about telling one of the other devs how close we had come to screwing up the entire run-through but decided to hold my tongue for now. If anyone tried to give me crap in the next few weeks, I could point to the change control logs and show how I had saved everyone’s ass.

My phone rang and I saw Beatrice’s number appear on the screen.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Called the number and it went straight to voicemail. I hung up and then a minute later got a call back from a restricted number.”

“Who was it?”

“Nobody, it was just a recorded message with an address and a time. 1218 Avenue of the Americas. 42nd floor. 2:30 p.m.”

“2:30? But the run-through starts at 11.”

“And that’s my problem because?”

“Because I’m not going to be done by then. It’s going to take at least three hours, maybe more, depending on how stable the current build is.”

“Fascinating. I’ll just call the Guild back and ask them if we could push the summons until 4. I’m sure it’s fine, they’re a very understanding organization.”

“Not funny. I’m going to get fired if I duck out early.”

“So? Duncan was probably going to get you fired soon anyway. At least now you can leave on your own terms.”

“You know what? You’re right. Why even stay for the run-through? I may as well march down to my boss’s office and leave my resignation let-”

“I’m going back to sleep. See you at 2:20 outside the building.”

Next: Jen and Beatrice attend an important meeting.