“You got it somewhere?”
“Bits and pieces. Old notebooks. Maybe a partial model buried in my Dropbox.”
“Dust it off,” he said. “Run it by me. I’ll help you test it if you want.”
Sabine looked down at her screen—at the report she’d been dreading, the clients she managed, the day-to-day she’d accepted as the ceiling.
For the first time in a long time, she thought:Maybe not.
“Okay,” she said.
They stayed in the office hours past lunch—past when anyone else really cared about dashboards or deliverables.
Sabine had barely touched her salad. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen, fingers dancing over her keyboard as she built out the bones of what used to only live in her notebooks. She and Malik had turned one of the shared meeting rooms into a makeshift war room. Sticky notes lined the wall. Two laptops. A whiteboard covered in decision-tree logic, handwritten formulas, and UI wireframe sketches.
It was happening.
They were building it.
Aderra.
That’s what she decided to name it. A mix ofAdeandAdair—her children’s father and her son. It sounded sleek, intentional. Familiar. It reminded her that everything she’d lived through wasn’t in vain. That she could create something from the fragments of her past.
Aderra would be a streamlined, AI-assisted platform for small businesses, startups, nonprofits—anyone who needed smarter ways to forecast outcomes, optimize decisions, and run what-if scenarios in real time. Something powerful but intuitive. Something beautiful.
“Okay, this conditional loop is damn near perfect,” Malik said from beside her, eyes squinting at the screen. “It recalculates based on changes to input values with minimal lag.”
“That’s because I built it that way,” Sabine said, half-smiling.
“Oh excuse me, I forgot I was working with the Beyoncé of business analytics.”
She rolled her eyes but didn’t correct him. Truth was, it feltgoodto be seen as excellent again. Not as someone’s ex-wife, or someone’s grief-stricken mother. Just…her. Sabine. Sharp. Focused. Building something that mattered.
“Hey,” Malik said, his voice dipping softer. “You really are kind of brilliant, you know?”
Sabine didn’t look up.
“Malik…”
“I’m just saying.”
She set her pen down. “I need you to hear me, and I’m only gonna say it once.” That got his attention. He sat back, hands raised slightly in mock surrender. “This—” she motioned between them, to the laptops, the code, the whiteboard, “—is work. It’s my dream, my second chance. I appreciate your help more than you know, but if you can’t keep it professional, I understand. I won’t be mad if you want to step away.”
Malik blinked, taken aback. “Sabine, it’s not like that.”
She arched a brow.
“I mean yeah, you’re…you but I’m here forthis.For Aderra. Because I believe in it. You don’t have to worry about me making it weird.”
Sabine stared at him for a beat. Then gave a short nod.
“Cool.”
“Cool,” he echoed.
They got back to work.
By mid-afternoon, they had a working prototype. It wasn’t polished, not yet but it could pull in mock data, process it, and return three scenario-based recommendations for business decisions based on custom weighted values. Sabine watched it run on the shared monitor and felt something shift inside her.