Sure. I’m sure I’ll survive the bus ride home, alone. All by myself. By my lonesome. Without you.

I laughed at my phone. LOL The Soup Crew will assist, I’m sure. No taking seats from pregnant ladies.

I won’t need to if you’re not there.

“Hennessy?” Rachel asked from the hallway. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I was just…”

“Laughing at your phone? Skipping out on a meeting with Mr Sleazebag to text your new guy?”

I chuckled, totally busted. “Guilty as charged. I’m meeting him for dinner and didn’t want him to think I was gonna be a no-show if I’m not on the bus.” I sighed. “I better get back in there.”

“Good luck,” she said with a wink.

I went back into the room, and the report I’d given Rob still sat on the desk, untouched. “Did you sort out your personal life on my time?” he asked, smug and smiling.

“Your time?” I questioned. “No, what I did was waste my time when I wrote you a full, extensive report that you didn’t even read.”

He didn’t even flinch, but his tone took a cruel turn. “How’ve you been, Hennessy? You settling into your new life okay?”

I smiled at him. “Perfectly, thank you. It’s almost like minimal living, getting rid of the useless shit that cluttered your life. Does wonders for the soul.”

His gaze hardened and he shifted in his seat. “I’m not paying you a fortune to be insulted.”

“No,” I replied flatly. “You’re paying me to evaluate the security of your website, your brand, your livelihood, and identify vulnerabilities in your system, networks, and system infrastructure. You wanted me to run extensive penetration measures to find security exposures within your system configurations, hardware and software vulnerabilities, as well as operation witnesses in process for technical countermeasures.” I shrugged. “If you had read the report, you would know this.”

“The report was eighty-two pages of scripting, coding, and hardware engineering jargon.”

“There was a detailed summary on page seventy-nine.”

He smiled like he was enjoying this. “I hired you to give me a report from the fundamental understanding of our network vulnerabilities.”