The morning they fired me for having the flu, the servers under downtown Boston were glowing like a second skyline, humming quietly under the feet of executives who thought they were in control.

They had no idea most of those machines were singing my code.

By the time the HR manager slid the termination papers across a glass table on the 27th floor, I already knew something they didn’t: three sick days was about to become the most expensive decision Vertex Solutions had ever made. Forty-two million dollars expensive, to start.

My name is Tessa Hart. For nine years, I was the invisible backbone of a mid-sized American tech company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Not the kind of name you see on magazine covers or tech blogs. I wasn’t the visionary founder or the keynote speaker at conferences in San Francisco. I was the person that made sure nothing crashed while everyone else was busy taking credit.

The air that morning smelled like burned coffee and lemon-