Better Off Alone

Chapter 6

(Sean's POV)

Hannah adjusts Jack on her hip. He’s too big for it — legs dangling past her knees, sneakers bumping her thigh — but he doesn’t squirm. He leans into her the way kids lean into people they trust, chin on her shoulder, one hand fisted in the collar of her cream blouse.

"Why isn't Rebecca here?"

She smooths Jack’s collar while she asks, eyes on the fabric.

I frown. Her name sitting in my mouth like a coin I swallowed wrong. Rebecca is my wife. I should hear her name without my jaw tightening. But the name pulls on something — a snag — and before I can stop it, my mind goes back years to how she entered my life in the first place.

—

I sit in the back, third row of a Stanford auditorium that smells like floor polish and cold metal. Two hundred seats, maybe more, stacked steep around a stage that sits below like an island. Harsh white light that flattens everything it touches.

I’m here for a sponsor-invitation student showcase.

The kind of event I show up to for the tax write-off and the quiet scouting — the annual parade of grad students pitching research to industry wallets. I’ve sat through four already.

Battery storage. Agricultural drones. Predictive maintenance for wind turbines.

Fine. Competent. Forgettable.

Nothing worthy of investment.

I'm checking my watch when the lights shift.

The auditorium goes darker. Not all the way — just enough that the stage sharpens and the audience turns into a blur. The halogen spots tighten overhead. The AC kicks harder. Dry, metallic. Breathe through your mouth and your tongue goes to paper.

A figure walks out from the wing.

Small. Straight-backed. A hood pulled low over her face, fabric falling past her cheekbones. And under it — half her face covered by hair. No name on the display behind her, just one word.

SNOW.

The program in my lap says the same. Snow. Meridian Technologies. Confidential entrant. Pioneer Competition finalist.

I almost laugh.

Masked. At a student showcase.

Unnecessary and theatrical.

I lean back and wait for the gimmick to match the packaging.

She starts talking and my brain just—stops.

Eighteen minutes. She goes eighteen straight without notes, without glancing at the screen, without a single pause that isn’t put there on purpose. The hologram builds as she talks — a swarm of nanorobots, hundreds of them, lit up in hard blue, navigating a simulated artery. They move like a living thing. They read the blood flow and adjust in real time, slide into a bifurcation, split, reform around a clot, and eat it from the inside.

The room goes quiet.

Not courteous quiet. Not the waiting-to-clap hush. Dead quiet. The kind where the hum of the overheads gets loud, the air vents start sounding like surf, and two hundred senior researchers and executives forget to breathe at the same time.

My pen is gone.

I don’t remember setting it down. My hand is flat on the armrest, empty, and I’m already forward in my seat, elbows on my knees, eyes locked on a woman whose face I can’t see.

She finishes.

A man stands — white hair, heavy through the middle, minimum three decades on her, throws a question like a rock. Scalability. Failure rates for autonomous navigation in bifurcated vessels. His tone is all edge. The sound a man makes when he’s spent thirty years in this field and does not enjoy being made to feel small by a student in a hood.

Snow doesn’t move. Doesn’t shift her weight. Doesn’t look at the screen.

She gives him three numbers. A citation. Then a line that shuts the door. Latch catches. Clean. Final.

The man sits.

I don’t breathe.

I don’t notice until my lungs burn and I drag in air that tastes like recycled AC and cold metal, and the woman on the stage is already stepping back, the hologram dissolving behind her, the hood still low, the mask still in place.

She walks off the stage the same way she walked on. Small. Straight-backed. Chin level.

The applause starts late. It starts because someone in the fifth row starts clapping and the sound breaks the spell, and then everyone is clapping—but it isn’t the polished applause of an audience appreciating a performance. It’s the stunned kind you give when you just watched something you don’t have a category for.

I don’t clap. My hands grip the armrests. My pen is on the floor.

Something is lodged in me. Small enough to ignore. Too deep to pull out. Not admiration, exactly. Not attraction, exactly. Something between the two that doesn’t have a clean name.

A splinter.

The presentation ends. People stand, gather their bags, murmur to each other. I don’t move. I sit in the third row and watch the empty stage and the spot where she stood, and I think: who is she?