The Rewrite

The next morning, the Quantum Lab was quiet.

Reid was sitting at Clara’s workstation. He wasn't coding. He was reading through the commit logs.

He saw it all now. *Clara\_Lin: patched memory leak.* *Clara\_Lin: optimized sort.* *Clara\_Lin: fixed Reid’s mess.*

He felt a wave of nausea. He had treated the architect of their success like a secretary.

He looked over at his own station. The slides were open.

Reid began to type. He deleted his name from the title card. He moved Clara’s name to the top.

He spent the rest of the day rewriting the documentation. He commented every line of her code, highlighting her contributions. He built a new slide deck that focused entirely on the elegant solutions she had implemented.

He was debugging the code, yes. But mostly, he was debugging himself.

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