Day Fourteen
The only warning he had were her her shoes laying haphazard in the front hall. He paused when the door hit them, but it was already too late.
“Where’ve you been?” Beth asked from around the corner. Her voice was cold. She was still mad.
“S-s-shopping,” he called, easing in and taking his own shoes off quietly, as slow as possible. When he peered into the workspace, she was staring right at him.
“Reggie called,” she said. “Half an hour ago. I told him you’d call him back.”
“Oh. Um. Right.”
“He yelled at me,” she said, and left it hanging in the air like the nuclear bomb it was. Raj’s first instinct was to run, to get as far away as he could, but he knew that wouldn’t really solve anything. He had to face this, or she would hunt him down and make him suffer.
“I told you he’s a—” he began.
“He’s a dipshit, is what he is. And I told him as much. I don’t know what kind of print-your-own-diploma monkey school he went to, but what on Earth makes him think he has any right to lecture me about how to run a company? He can’t even use ‘in lieu of’ correctly in a sentence, the moron!”
“You can’t let it get to you or—”
“Oh, it got to me all right. I told him I’d kick his ass if I ever saw him again. That shut him up real fast.”
Raj knew the feeling.
“Look,” he ventured, “I know you’re not going to like this, but I thought maybe we could try and mirror iSA onto another machine, just in case.”
Until now, all Beth’s rage had been focussed on some intangible other that was mercifully beyond her reach. But now… now Raj was drawing that fire. Her eyes shot down to the box in his hand, then back to his face.
“What is that?” she spat.
“I picked it up as a… an insurance policy…”
She got off the seat, stormed over, and snatched the MacBook box from his hand and shoved it onto the table, knocking utensils and two plastic cups onto the floor.
“So what,” she said. “So we’re going to copy iSA over, and let him wipe the original? Is that your plan?”
“No, I’m just saying that if things get out of hand — for whatever reason — it’s better if there’s a backup copy somewhere that we know we can work from, so—”
“So nothing!” she yelled, and pushed the box back so hard it very nearly fell off the other side of the table. “No! I told you yesterday to fix this, and you haven’t done a thing, Raj! And now this? This is not a solution—”
“What else am I going to do? Grovel? I don’t have many options now that you’ve promised to kick his ass, do I?”
“So now this is my fault?” she screamed, face turning red.
“It’s nobody’s fault!” he boomed. “Nobody! But Jesus, Beth! Sometimes you can’t win a fight with punches! Sometimes you’ve got to take a breath and think your way through! I know you don’t want to give him the satisfaction of wiping your computer, but if it does no harm to iSA, maybe it’s the safer way!”
She stared at her computer, then at the new one’s box, and finally at Raj. If she was seeing the light, she was hiding it well.
“Do what you like,” she said, her voice quiet with rage. “But he’s not wiping my computer. If words won’t work on him, I’ll find another way. I’m not giving up my pride without a fight.”