All of Peter's work on the new and improved Joey Plus was over. Matthew had taken away the thing that was more important to him than anything else in the world. Peter could just picture it, how it would proceed from this day forward - Matthew marching into the engineering group, armed with a complicated schedule and an army of bozo project managers, all meant to scare the development team into finishing the Joey Plus. Then of course he would re-introduce it and take all the credit for Peter's hard work and vision.
How? Peter wondered. How could Matthew, the person he had sanctioned to join him in creating something so exciting and important, do this?
"Simple," Peter said aloud, at last letting himself acknowledge the underlying truth of the whole mess. "He used me."
Yes, he'd been used. But for the last time. Enough was enough. As soon as he got home, he would begin weeding from his life everyone who was using him.
His car phone jingled, and he punched it, knocking it to the floor. No more talking. It was too late for that. He gripped the wheel more tightly and pressed down hard on the gas pedal, eager to get home and begin undoing his mistakes, ditching the bad parts, nurturing the good parts. It would be just that easy.
He would start with Ivy.
* * *
"I think he answered, but then he hung up," Eileen said, holding the telephone to her ear.
"Forget it," Matthew told his secretary. He closed his office door and seated himself before his computer. He closed his eyes let out an exhausted sigh. Leave it alone, he told himself. Leave him alone, you can't get through to him, can't make him understand. It has to be this way. There is no other way.
His plan had worked. The executive staff and board of directors had faith in him to run the company after all. Peter could no longer stand in the way of his taking control of Wallaby. Now he was free to build momentum and power as he moved into the next phase of his plan. He felt a dizzying rush of elation as he fully comprehended what he'd just done. Though he had sincerely cared for Peter when they'd first met, after awhile he had grown less enchanted as he was reminded that falling for the young inventor would prevent him from ever achieving his real goal at Wallaby. He wholeheartedly wished things could have turned out differently. But they had not. And it was over. He only wished Peter had tried harder to understand the real reason everyone in the boardroom had voted against him, even though they themselves had not yet admitted it. He had known all along that Peter would not simply bow out gracefully and accept a non-management role in the company. If only he had been more receptive to the idea of connecting to ICP's computers, this would have never happened. There was no room for being sentimental now, he told himself. Why revisit the past? But as Matthew rested his eyes, he allowed his mind to wander back anyway, letting the memory of those intoxicating early days deepen the resonance of his most recent triumph.