Alpha 1 by Abby Weeks

after you.”
    “You sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure.”
    “How do I use it?”
    “Just stand in it and close the door. When the door closes it will start automatically. It’s like a carwash. You’ll be clean in no time.”
    “How will I shut it off.”
    “You can tell it to stop with your voice.”
    “You’re kidding?”
    “For real. Or you can just wait for it to finish automatically.”
    Holden left Jimmy to change. He went out to the dressing room to select their clothes. Luckily they were both the same size. There was row upon row of suits, shirts, socks, shoes, belts, sun glasses, everything a man could possibly need. Holden picked out a couple of suits and laid them on the dressing table.
    Then he crossed the suite and entered his office. He looked around. Everything was as it had been, as it has always been. His mahogany table was directly across from him in front of a wall of glass that looked out over the New York skyline. There was a laptop on the table in the exact position he’d left it the day his wife had died. The papers had been tidied up into a pile but they were from the deal he’d been working on that day. That deal hadn’t gone through. Nothing had gone through in the couple of months after the accident. Holden’s staff had thought that he might not be coming back to work any time soon. Some of them thought that if they wanted to keep their jobs they had better come up with deals of their own. But pretty soon the nighttime messages began arriving. Holden told each and every trader and analyst that worked for him exactly what to do. Under Holden’s invisible leadership, West Financial Group had secretly become the most lucrative trading house on Wall Street.
    The current project he was working on, the turbocharger patents he was looking at, was the first piece of work he’d become personally involved in since Meg’s death. For Holden it was more than a deal, it was personal. It meant something to him. No one at the firm understood it, they saw it as an eccentric personal interest of the company founder, a man who was still struggling to get over the death of his beloved wife, but to Holden it meant so much more than that. It was his way of proving that old things, things that had supposedly died, like good old fashioned American automobiles, could live again.
    His heart might still be broken, but there was nothing wrong with his head. He knew he could make a success of the turbocharger patent. On a complete whim he’d guessed that some old mechanic somewhere in the country would be in agreement with him.
    He walked over to his desk. There was a photo in a silver frame, a photo of Meg. He picked it up and looked at it. She looked beautiful, as beautiful as she ever had. Holden sighed. It hurt him to look at it, and it hurt him to have to admit it to himself, but the time had come for him to move on. Realizing how he’d felt about Lucy had taught him that much. Loosing his wife had hurt him deeply, he’d never forget about her for as long as he lived, but two years of mourning was enough. If he’d been smart he would have asked Lucy out earlier and now she’d be going out with him and not that other guy. He couldn’t let life keep passing him by.
    He hadn’t realized he’d been ready to move on until he’d seen Lucy kiss that guy. That had been the moment when he knew his heart wasn’t as dead as he’d thought. It was alive and it was still kicking.
    “Wow,” Jimmy called from the other room. “That was amazing.”
    “I put out some suits in the dressing room,” Holden said as he got into the shower.
    When Holden got out of the shower he felt like a new man. He was ready to move forward, into the future, and embrace the life he’d been given. Meg would have wanted it. As he stood next to Jimmy and got into his perfectly fitted suit he began to feel more optimistic than he had in a long time.
    “So,” Jimmy said, “what was that patent we were looking at