Selina was right. He wasn’t looking for a future in all his travels. He was trying to not commit himself in case his past called him back. He wanted to be able to leap when that phone call came asking for his help.
He pressed his head against the cold windowpane. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Curtis and the team he now headed couldn’t do the work to keep their baby afloat, or even that Marc was angry over being left out. He had chosen not to take a position with the company that had bought their platform. With all that money on the table and the chimera of freedom beckoning, he’d thought moving on to something new was what he wanted.
Moving on was a hell of a lot scarier than staying put.
All the more reason to admire Selina and the guts she’d shown to get in his car and find a new place to live.
He banged his head against the window until his headache reminded him that his head was better used for thinking than as a hammer.
As he was digging through his backpack for his laptop, the phone in his pocket buzzed with a text message. Curtis. A name he’d not seen in his texting app since Marc had started sending him e-mails about key exchanges.
Interested in work?
Marc’s heart began to pound.
Yes!
Not our project. That’s done.
God, text messaging could be so annoying for conversations like this. Seeing one small sentence pop across his screen and wondering what would follow but having to wait for it was the worst.
Group working on improved mobile security for banking. Focused on banks in developing countries. Want more info?
Marc tossed the phone to the bed. Mobile banking security was . . .
He was going to say boring, but the more he thought about it, the less boring it seemed. He’d read enough stories in the news about the importance of mobile banking in developing countries to know that something so simple could change the lives of millions. No, billions of people.
He grabbed the phone.
E-mail me.
Not that his decision was made, but he could at least start doing research.
*
Marc skied while he was at Snowdance. He’d paid for the skis, the room, and the lift tickets. Plus, it was fun. But he skipped the pool in favor of room service and lots of time spent in front of his laptop, doing research and negotiating positions. He found the hotel’s business room where he could print for exorbitant amounts of money and use a scanner. He contacted old computer geek friends for information and got put in touch with some new contacts with experience in mobile banking.
By the time the end of the week rolled around, Marc was barely able to bend his knees after all the skiing, but he had a new job lined up and ideas on how to improve security in mobile banking while keeping the application flexible enough to be used across countries with various cultural expectations of banking and money.
Ideas that would translate into months and months of work to get off the ground and perfect, followed by years of tweaking as technology changed.
Marc shoved his dirty ski clothes into his bag, not able to remember when he’d last been so excited to sit in front of a computer for hours on end. The best part of the job was that it would give him stability and something to work on, but the international goal of the work meant he’d also have an excuse to travel.
As he zipped up the bag, he wondered if Selina would see the compromise. He needed one more week to wrap everything up and pin down his future, and then he’d call her.
No. Better yet, he would stop by her house and talk to her.
He wasn’t doing this for her, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t hoping she would be one of the benefits.
*
Selina staggered into Pam’s house, her feet aching from being on them all day. She’d worked a double shift today at the restaurant downtown, which was hard but necessary. In the past couple of weeks since Marc had left, she’d registered for spring classes at the local community college, talked with the gallery owner about a possible job there, and landed herself a waitressing job. All the while, she helped Pam around the house.
She sighed as she pulled her shoes off her feet and wiggled her toes. Not only did the work add money to her bank account but it kept her mind off her loneliness. Pam was good company, too. Selina had gone out to coffee once with one of her coworkers also. But none of them distracted her from the fact that she missed Marc.
With a sigh, she stood up and shuffled to the bathroom to brush her teeth. It would all get easier, she told herself. One day.
Chapter Thirteen
Selina was about to hang an ornament on Pam’s tree when the doorbell rang. She nestled the fragile ornament—a white china bird’s nest—back into its small piece of protective wrap and went to the front door to answer it.