Seven-thirty. Time. Time is a Mobius strip. Coding. Working. Training. An endless ribbon of activity; iterations, pushing, perfecting. Doug heads for his car, not sure why he is leaving, or, where he is going.

Hope sits across the table from the man she’s thought about, grappled with, left without saying why, and taken on an imaginary roller-coaster ride of her shape-shifting emotions for the past three years. She’s not sure working with him is a good idea.

Jeff’s office looks like a cross between the overnight camping trip of a preternaturally rambunctious Boy Scout troop and an X-rated pajama party for a sect of animals for which there is no genus. What it smells like is more easily recognizable – dried-out pizza, stale beer and sweat.

Old boy gravitas oozes from his body like the peaty scent of Scotch from wood paneled rooms. Still, there’s enough of a bad boy glint in his eyes to know that he would shoot you the finger across the board room table if he objected to your business plan.

Arthur McKnight had raised a 10M round on the idea that skaters, boarders and cyclists were hot to film themselves acting out Feartoshred’s dares: catapult over a creek or a river, surf the Big Island at dawn wearing a fluorescent tee and ski goggles.

At the moment, sitting in his idling car under a rustling sycamore on a cool evening in front of Hope’s apartment seems not only perfectly normal, but a good idea. He hasn’t sat outside of a girl’s house since he was what? Fifteen? Except that he wasn’t married then.

He’ll head home. Call Jared, and then Hope. If he’s going to go back to work, if he’s going to give up his dream of being a rock star, he needs to find out where lightning is going to strike next.