Page 37 of Off Her Game

“It didn’t end well.” She pretended absorbing interest in the napkin. A side-glance found the quiet couple seated next to them focusing on their e-readers, but she bet they were eavesdropping.

“What does that mean? Bad breakup?”

Her eyelids drifted closed on a long sigh. She removed her hand from his to cover her face. “I warned you ex talk would be bad, but okay, here goes. We’d worked together to design a pretty cool program that would allow easy integration of medical records between a few of the common medical data programs without requiring manual reentry of data. A true game changer. Any hospital changing to a new system would want it. Okay, I pretty much did all the work while he provided moral support. He stole it, sold it, and sued me when I claimed designership. I didn’t have any money to hire a lawyer and fight it. He dropped the case when I threatened to take him to court for assault.”

“He assaulted you?” Noah tensed.

“He didn’t take well to the idea of breaking up and losing his programming hookup. He slapped me when I confronted him about cheating. I kind of kicked the crap out of him.” She glanced up, wondering if this would freak him out. “Who knew a black belt in karate would come in handy.”

“A secret ninja. I’m glad you kicked his ass.” He grinned.

She smiled back, but soon lost it. She leaned in to whisper to avoid eavesdroppers. “This whole thing is only going to get worse. Much worse. I’m not scared for myself, but for you and Emma and my roommates, and anyone who can be targeted. If anything happens to them or you it’ll be my fault. You should get out of this. Walk away.”

“No.” He wrapped an arm around her and whispered back, “None of this is your fault. We both got into this knowing it came with risk.”