Chapter 5 - Project Leo
Over the next six months, the new division thrived. I brought in adult neurodivergent consultants, including my own son, Sam, to test the products. We weren't designing things to "cure" autism; we were designing technology that adapted to them.
Noise-canceling headphones that didn't clamp aggressively on the skull. Keyboards with mechanical switches that provided perfect, grounding tactile feedback. Tablets with operating systems that didn't rely on overwhelming visual clutter.
We called it Project Leo.
And for the first time in his life, little Leo Vance was thriving. He would come to the office after school, bypass his mother's desk entirely, and come sit in my office. We would test the new mechanical keyboards together. He was still nonverbal, but he was communicating through the technology we were building.
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Eleanor and I spent countless late nights in the lab. The billionaire CEO and the former janitor, eating takeout Chinese food over blueprints. I saw the real Eleanor—a fiercely loving, terrified, brilliant mother. And she saw me—a man who had survived the fire and learned how to build something out of the ashes.
But while we were building, Richard Sterling was plotting.
