Chapter 1

Ethan Knight' s first tech company went down hard. One day he was a Silicon Valley wonder boy, the next he was broke, a joke. Nobody in Palo Alto would touch him.

I was Sarah Miller, his girlfriend then. I believed in him, or maybe I just loved him too much. I emptied my savings account, every penny I had.

I was a good software engineer, really good. We started a new company, right there in our tiny apartment, coding day and night.

His parents, they had a bad car accident. Ethan was driving, distracted, stressed from his failure. They needed constant care at home. I did that too, between coding sessions and trying to keep Ethan from falling apart. His ego was a fragile thing. The stress was immense.

I had a miscarriage during that time, the doctors said it was the strain. I never told Ethan it was his mother' s constant demands for her care that pushed me over the edge. He had enough on his plate.

Three years. That' s how long it took. Our new software, the one I mostly designed, it took off. We were rich. We had a huge house, the kind you see in magazines. I thought, finally, we made it. We could breathe. I was wrong.