My Great Escape Led Me to You (Emily Blair) novel Chapter 461

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All of Emily Blair’s programmers had been called back to the office on short notice for overtime. Those who couldn’t make it in were working from home. Emily wasn’t one to shortchange her team—she’d promised triple their daily wage for overtime, and today’s travel and meal expenses would all be reimbursed.

The bug this time was especially tricky. Even her team of top-tier programmers—most with master’s degrees from prestigious schools—couldn’t resolve it right away. Xavier Gonzalez was away on a business trip to the South with Elizabeth Wilson, leaving him unavailable. Emily herself had only just been notified about the bug and hadn’t had time to look into how tough it might be to fix.

To speed things up, she decided to drag Tristan Davis back to the office.

With Tristan on board, it took just the two of them—Emily and Tristan—to squash the bug. They handed it over to the testing department, job done.

Emily took a mug of coffee from her assistant and set it down in front of Tristan. “Thanks for the hard work. Dinner’s on me tonight.”

Tristan immediately waved her off, pushing the coffee away. “No way. I know you—you’ll use dinner as an excuse to rope me into more overtime.”

Emily raised an eyebrow. “Suit yourself. Head home, then. I’ll stick around a bit longer.”

To leave the office, Tristan had to walk past her. As he did, he reached out and ruffled her perfectly styled hair, completely messing it up.

“See you, workaholic.”

Emily spun around to glare at him, but Tristan was too quick—he dodged her half-hearted swipe and slipped out the door.

After he left, Emily settled back into her usual routine, meticulously reviewing every line of code she’d just written.

It was a habit she’d developed over the years—never quite able to trust that things were perfect until she’d double- and triple-checked them herself.

Thinking back to the early months after she and her team released their short video platform to the app stores, she remembered how few users they had at first. Only she and a handful of teammates had actually downloaded the app. None of the angel investors seemed interested, and Elizabeth would come back from investor meetings fuming, having been dismissed with icy indifference.

No funding meant their startup dream was dead on arrival. Elizabeth, Xavier, and the rest of the team were on the verge of despair. Emily even caught two teammates browsing job boards during work hours.