Chapter 5
Jake
I pushed open the door, expecting to find Sarah reading on the couch or maybe hear Emma's soft breathing from her room.
Instead, moonlight streamed through the blinds onto an empty living room.
"Sarah! Emma! Where are you?"
My voice echoed back, hollow and unanswered. Emma's toys were gone. Her little princess castle that usually cluttered the coffee table had vanished, leaving only clean surfaces and terrible clarity.
Then I saw it.
Divorce papers sat on the coffee table like a final bug report—neat, organized, devastating.
I ran through the house like a man debugging a critical error. Emma's closet was half-empty. Her bed held only Mr. Patches, the teddy bear she must have forgotten in their rush to leave. Sarah's nursing textbooks were gone from our bedroom.
I murmured, "This can't be real. She wouldn't just leave..."
I grabbed my phone, fingers shaking as I dialed Sarah's number.
"The number you have dialed is not in service..."
I stared at Mr. Patches on Emma's bed. "Mr. Patches... where did they go?"
The bear's button eyes offered no answers.
By 2 PM the next day. I'd been frantically refreshing social media since dawn, watching my reputation compile errors in real time.
Brad approached my desk awkwardly, like he was delivering news of a security breach. "Jake... uh, you might want to see this article."
The Information had published their exposé at noon: SoulSync CEO's Double Life: Married Father Masquerades as Single Entrepreneur.
"How did they find out? Who leaked this?" I scrolled through the piece, watching my carefully constructed image decompress into chaos.
But it was David that really destroyed me. My old coworker David had posted: [I watched Jake's wife Sarah work double shifts to support his coding dreams, then disappear when VC money came in.]
The comments section exploded:
[Fake founder, fake app, fake marriage. Silicon Valley at its worst.]
[Dude literally deleted his family from his LinkedIn like they were deprecated code.]
[Sarah deserved better. Hope she gets half his equity.]
Each comment felt like another vulnerability in my system, exposing flaws I thought I'd patched.
At 4 PM, our office's main display showed SoulSync's App Store rating in real-time: 4.2 stars becoming 3.7, then 2.1, then a devastating 1.2. The Twitter hashtag #FakeLoveApp was trending at number one.
My phone rang. Mr. Harrison from Data Flow Solutions.
He said, "Jake, we can't be associated with this kind of personal brand disaster."
I replied, "Mr. Harrison, this is just media sensationalism. My personal life doesn't affect our product quality—"
Yet he cut me off, "It affects everything, Jake. Trust is the foundation of business. You've lost ours."
The line went dead.
I refreshed the App Store reviews, each one a knife twist:
[How can someone who destroys his own family create an app about love?]
[Deleted. Never trusting this developer again.]
[One star for being a fraud. Sarah deserves everything.]
My Instagram DMs were flooded with angry users. My LinkedIn was a graveyard of professional connections distancing themselves. I'd spent years building this platform, and it was disintegrating faster than a corrupted database.
The emergency board meeting at 7 PM felt like a post-mortem for my career.
Madison sat at the head of the table, every inch the calculated investor. No trace of the woman who'd laughed at my jokes just days ago.
"Gentlemen, we're facing a significant brand crisis. Jake's personal scandal has compromised our investment."
She was discussing me like a failing startup, not someone she'd been sleeping with.
"Madison, what's your recommendation for damage control?" asked her partner, Thompson.
Madison replied, "We need to distance ourselves from this controversy. Perhaps consider bringing in a new CEO."
The room spun. "Madison, I thought... I thought we had something special."
She looked at me with the same expression she'd use to evaluate a underperforming algorithm. "Jake, this is business. Personal feelings have no place in investment decisions."
I understood then. I wasn't her lover or even her friend. I was a portfolio item, and my performance metrics had crashed. She was simply cutting her losses.
The realization felt like watching your entire codebase get corrupted while you stood helpless.
I was alone in my empty house, staring at my laptop screen. I'd been refreshing Sarah's social media obsessively, but her accounts were locked or deleted. Then I found her LinkedIn.
Emergency Room Nurse at Oregon Health Center.
She'd done it. She'd rebuilt her career while I'd been destroying mine. I scrolled through her professional updates—RN license renewed, trauma certification completed. Each achievement felt like a rebuke to my own failures.
I remembered the night she'd told me about nursing school, how her eyes lit up when she described helping people. I'd dismissed it then, too focused on my own dreams to see hers.
"Sarah, if you can hear this..." I started recording a voice message I'd never send. "I'm so sorry. You and Emma were my real success, and I was too blind to see it."
Around me, the house displayed all my achievements—MacBook Pro, investment term sheets, TechCrunch articles featuring my face. They felt like monuments to my own stupidity now.
I picked up Emma's butterfly hair clip from the coffee table, remembering the morning she'd first called me "Daddy," her small voice bright with pride. The clip felt impossibly light in my palm, like holding a fragment of deleted code—something beautiful I'd carelessly overwritten.
Madison was right about one thing—this was just business. But Sarah... Sarah was love. And I'd optimized her right out of my life, trading authentic connection for hollow metrics.
I sat in my success-filled house, finally understanding the difference between building something valuable and building something that lasts. My app would crash and burn, taking my reputation with it. But somewhere in Oregon, Sarah was saving lives and raising our daughter with the strength I'd never appreciated.
The system I'd really needed to debug was myself. And by the time I'd found the error, the damage was already permanent.