Technically Faking

by Robin Hale

  “She isn’t interested.”

  The scoff from my cousin was beyond adding insult to my injury.

  “I understand that you only date when the situation becomes critical, so let me enlighten you: that girl looks at you like you’re a miracle. She’s interested. She’s probably sitting at home feeling like a failure,” Dahlia continued. “The board voted against you and she thinks she doesn’t get to see you anymore. It’s basically the worst possible outcome.” She gestured with her champagne flute and the lights made the bubbles sparkle diamond-bright in her glass. “At the very least, you should tell her that you’re okay. That you don’t blame her and this isn’t a bad outcome.”

  The muscle in my jaw worked while I processed Dahlia’s recommendation. She wasn’t — she wasn’t wrong, exactly. Amber had likely concluded that the end of the contract had been a failure, even if I didn’t agree with Dahlia’s assessment of her feelings about the romantic aspect.

  But she might’ve had a point about the other part. The part where I owed Amber an explanation and reassurance that the result was acceptable.

  “Fine,” I said after long minutes of silence. “I’ll arrange a meeting.”

  “No,” Dahlia groaned. “Not a meeting. Arrange a date. A grand gesture. A skywriter or something.”

  My eyes slid toward the library with its comfortable chairs and large tables I’d hunched over for the better part of a year while getting SparkSignal ready for its first round of investing. That would work.

  “You’re planning something business-y and tedious, aren’t you?” Dahlia sighed.

  “Would you see if the kitchen could do a spanakopita for me?” I asked as I wandered toward the library. It wouldn’t take long. My cousin could still have her party.

  “That’s a yes, then.” Dahlia’s voice faded as she wandered away, and I could imagine the way her shoulders would sag.

  I let a smile steal its way onto my face. The sounds of her footsteps were heading to the kitchen.

  * * *

  MY PEN SCRATCHED over the notebook pages in bursts of automatic fire, carving a way forward where there’d once been nothing. The plan had been percolating in the back of my mind since Amber’s outburst — her insistence that I wasn’t happy sitting at the top of SparkSignal, regardless of the need to fight to keep it. I just hadn’t had the relevant numbers until the vote.

  God, the vote.

  I’d known before the chairman had opened his mouth that they’d already decided. It was written all over his weaselly face. I’d expected it to bother me. Every time I’d thought about it in the weeks preceding the vote, thought about what it might feel like to stand there and have my company removed from my control — to have it done forcibly — I’d been incandescent with anger. My chest had gone tight, my mouth dry. I’d been unable to relax my hands from where they’d balled into fists.

  But once I stood there, in that absurd board room? Once the moment had come?

  All I’d felt was relief.

  “No one here would dream of keeping you from following your passion, Ms. Spark,” Chairman Ritter had said, telling me the narrative that would be spread across every industry magazine and blog in the coming days. “You’ve become too synonymous with SparkSignal to dream of replacing you, but we will try to muddle onward in your honor. We wish you every possible success in your road forward.”

  So, we’d done it. Mostly. The shock and awe campaign of painting my name across social media, of giving my abrasive exterior a love-flushed coat of paint had done its job.

  It hadn’t been enough to keep the company in the end. They’d already decided. Garberson would take the helm, and I’d kindly not sink a knife into his back while he did it.

  Once Garberson’s vote was confirmed, they’d closed the doors to the limited press, and I’d sat down with Ritter to hash out the particulars. The exact figures.

  The resignation letter would be back-dated to fit the narrative, and the press release was sent out minutes after I agreed on the karat-purity of my golden parachute.

  Now it was time to look ahead.

  I scanned the documents spread out in front of me, made sure they were in coherent order, and set about outlining the only gesture that I could offer Amber while still being honest.

  Dahlia would hate it. She’d roll her eyes and scoff and tell me that I was destined to be alone forever.

  But Amber. Amber would understand.

  * * *

  “WELL?” Catherine’s sharp voice split the silence I’d wrapped around myself in armor plating.

  I looked up from the array of notes spread in front of me, the empty plates that hadn’t quite disappeared, the champagne flute that had been refilled — again — without my realizing it.

  Catherine looked like she’d run to the Lovelace. Her normally carefully coiffed hair was ragged, her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes darted around the room like she expected armed invaders to pour in from the windows. If we could bottle the tension in her shoulders, I was certain we could power a small city.

  “Dahlia said it was an emergency.”

  I rolled my eyes and huffed, leaning back into my chair. “Dahlia exaggerates.”

  “You haven’t been booted?” Catherine asked dryly.

  “That part is accurate.” I took a sip of the magically-refilling champagne.

  Catherine settled into one of the chairs across the table from me, eyeing me as if I’d sprouted a second head. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be this calm.”

  I shrugged. “My priorities have recently shifted.”

  Cate stared at me, still carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, knee bouncing like an addict, mouth tensing and relaxing with words she wouldn’t quite spit out.

  “Just say it,” I suggested. “You’ll feel better. Or I will. Your twitching is unnerving.”

  “You said we’re friends.” The words were blunt, tripped over the carefully painted curves of Cate’s mouth. “At the gala. You said that we…are friends.”

  “Aren’t we?” I asked in surprise. That wasn’t what I’d thought she needed to say.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so.” Cate sat forward on the edge of her seat. “You barely tolerate me.”

  I blinked. “You’re one of a handful of people I do tolerate. I don’t spend time with anyone else. Of course we’re friends.”

  That statement worked its way through Catherine’s mind visibly, painting her sharp features with the exact expression of an engine trying to process sugar, if an engine had a face. “Then — I — I’m sorry about the board’s decision.”

  She looked constipated.

  “You’re even worse at this than I am, aren’t you?” I marveled.

  That shattered Catherine’s discomfort and morphed her features into a familiar scowl. It was better, at least. “Oh, shut up.”

  “No, really,” I chuckled. “That’s — it’s sweet.”

  “I hate you.”

  “You’re a true friend.”

  “I don’t know why I showed up for this,” Catherine groused into her empty hands.

  “You’re here because no one has ever wielded guilt more artfully than Dahlia Fallon.” I quirked a brow at her acknowledging nod. “And because my cousin means well, but I have a more practical plan than synchronized drinking.”

  That caught her attention. She motioned for me to continue.

  “I want a favor.”

  Cate eyed me warily. “What sort of favor?”

  “I want the first round of VC funding to come from you.” I watched her eyes narrow and the calculation in her mind move from the taffy-sticky mass of human emotion to something she understood more intuitively: investment.

  “What’s the project?” Cate asked.

  I slid the executive summary sheet I’d compiled toward her. She was sharp. She’d always been sharp. She instantly ingested the relevant information, found the supporting documentation I’d started scribbling together, and her eyes already gleamed with
conquest.

  “You don’t have a round of angel investing planned?” Catherine asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t need it. SparkSignal’s farewell package will cover expenses until the first launch.”

  Catherine’s low, appreciative hum echoed my feeling of victory when the board had finally made me a decent offer.

  “How is this a favor I’m doing for you? You and I both know this is solid. You’re not even asking for money until there’s a market-ready product.” Dark hair fell over her shoulders as she ducked her head to double-check a figure on a supporting page. “How is this a favor?”

  “It’s a risk.”

  Catherine scoffed.

  “It is. There’s a chance this tanks immediately out of the gate, and I’m asking you to handle the entire broad-launch.” I wasn’t an idiot. My name and my success with SparkSignal would help when Catherine pitched it to her firm. But asking one source to shoulder a burden the size of the one I was building was more than putting too many eggs in one basket. It was courting career suicide. “I’m not interested in repeating my mistakes with SparkSignal.”

  “When you pull this thing off,” Catherine drawled. “I’ll probably make partner off of it.”

  “And if I don’t, we’ll both need a job.”

  Humor glinted in that usually humorless face and the air warmed between us. Hell, had we truly not been friends? I had to start paying more attention.

  * * *

  THE DOOR to the library opened too smoothly to give itself away audibly. The Lovelace was too well-maintained for a creak or groan. No, what made me look away from where Catherine was making notes on my fledgling financials was the shift in light. The way every room pointed toward Amber Kowalczyk as soon as she was in it.

  My attention drew Catherine’s, and it took only a single glance before the brunette was gathering her bag and rising from her seat. “We’ll discuss this — tomorrow?” She asked, pausing briefly while I nodded. With a polite greeting, she passed Amber in the doorway and vacated the space.

  I couldn’t blame her. The air was suddenly full of terrible possibility.

  I rose from my seat, stilted and overly formal, and gestured to the chair Catherine had fled.

  Amber’s expression was unreadable.

  18

  AMBER

  Dahlia had pointed me toward the library with a soft smile and a half-empty glass of champagne. I didn’t think she was supposed to do that, strictly speaking. The Lovelace was a private club, and I probably wasn’t supposed to just go wandering wherever I wanted unattended. But she’d sent me off anyway, and as soon as I saw Iris sitting there, cool and calm and smooth as she always was, all of my carefully planned speeches fled from my brain.

  “So you’re a billionaire?” I asked like an idiot.

  Iris blinked. Obviously she was as surprised as I was that that was the first thing out of my mouth. Given the circumstances.

  “Yes. Well, no.” Her head made a jerking little twitch that looked like consideration. “My family. Not me.” She waited until I’d crossed from the door to the table, but she did settle back down. “You didn’t know?”

  Had her face ever been so inscrutable? “I should’ve, right?” I said with a humorless laugh, scrubbing my hand down my face. “Should’ve figured it out from a quick Google search but —”

  “I did tell you I’d changed my name.”

  “Did you?” Maybe she had. “I remember you saying it was easy — anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You look like it matters.” Iris’s blue eyes were steady on my face. “I didn’t intend to lie to you.”

  “No, I didn’t think you did.” Ugh, I was messing this up. “I’m — look, I’m doing this all wrong. I just — here.” I held out the notebook I’d carried for the past two years. It held...everything. Every last brainstorming session or overly optimistic plan had gone into that thing. I’d written New Year’s resolutions in it. Letters to old crushes that would never, ever be sent. Confessions of all the things I was scared to say out loud. It was some horror-show cross between a middle schooler’s diary and a business major’s most unrealistic plans for world domination.

  And I’d handed it to the smartest person I knew.

  “What is this?” Iris asked, carefully handling the notebook as if it might explode.

  I mean, that wasn’t too far from what I was afraid of, right?

  “It’s what I came up with before Carrie let me in on your family name.” I watched anxiously as Iris eased the notebook open to the marker.

  Blue eyes swept over the page with characteristic swiftness. And caution. What did she think I’d handed her?

  Her eyes went wide. “This is...Amber, this is a business plan.”

  “Hastily scribbled together but...yeah.” I shrugged and watched while Iris’s bottled-lightning mind put all the pieces together.

  “Rent, expenses, a six-month timeline, I — this is for you.” Iris’s attention snapped to my face. “You put together a plan…for you.”

  I bit into my lower lip and waited for that last little bit to slot into place.

  “You were going to have me move in with you.” The statement was flat, slightly disbelieving despite the certainty on Iris’s face.

  “I just wanted — you’re the only person I know that losing their job wouldn’t completely knock them flat, you know? I mean SparkSignal even owned your apartment.” I was rambling. I knew I was rambling. But, oh God, I couldn’t stop. It was important that she understood, that she really got how weird it was for me that she came from — that her family was so — Well. That she never needed to work at all. “I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it when Carrie mentioned Dahlia’s last name was Fallon.”

  “You were going to ask me to move in,” Iris repeated. “You were figuring out how you were going to pay for the increase in utilities — I —” Her voice broke off, throat gone audibly tight and shut. Her hands flexed and the notebook hit the top of the table with a solid thunk. She came around the table toward me, and I probably should’ve flinched back from the freight train bearing down, but I couldn’t pull back from Iris.

  Not ever.

  “I want to kiss you,” she said urgently.

  “That’s — yes. Please.” Basically coherent. As close to it as I was likely to get until after Iris was finished sucking the air out of my lungs, anyway.

  Her mouth seared my lips, moved relentlessly against me until my fingers were clenched, useless, in the front of her shirt. Her tongue was on mine like it had always belonged there. She licked whimpers from my throat, gasps from my mouth.

  “No one,” she rasped, forehead resting against mine when she finally pulled back. “Has ever tried to catch me. Tried to break my fall. No one.”

  I laughed weakly. “No one else would be stupid enough to think you’d need it.”

  She shook her head, eyes fierce, barely shy of angry. “No. You — you don’t care if I have SparkSignal.”

  I grimaced. I had been kind of insensitive about that, hadn’t I? “It isn’t that I don’t care…”

  “It doesn’t make a difference in how you think of me,” Iris pushed on. Her hands slid down my arms, wrapped around my wrists. Her fingers stroked at my skin, painting meaning into me where she couldn’t quite speak it. “It doesn’t matter to you that I’m a Fallon. You don’t care if I’m a CEO, or at the top of a successful company. You don’t care if I make the next Forbes list. You just want to help.”

  There hadn’t been many times when I’d been made speechless. My default setting was ‘charming redirect’ but I didn’t want to redirect. And I didn’t want Iris to keep talking. I couldn’t handle any more of it. There was too much hope building up in my chest, too much height on that card castle I’d constructed out of every half-friendly thing she’d ever said to me.

  I nodded. It was the only thing I could do.

  “Come work with me,” Iris said, pushing herself upright and gripping my hands more firmly.


  A startled laugh burst out of my mouth. “Where?” Oh God. Oh God, I didn’t say that.

  But rather than the flash of hurt or anger I might’ve expected, a speculative gleam took over Iris’s expression and her mouth lifted into the lopsided smile I loved so much. “Nanofiche.”

  “Nanofiche?” I parroted.

  The blonde nodded and leaned back across the table — shirt riding up over the dip in her hipbones, the ones I could practically taste just from looking at them — and grabbed a notebook. “That’s the plan, anyway. The next venture.”

  She handed the notes over to me and I tried to make sense of the numbers and charts she’d laid out in her careful small-caps print.

  “You were right,” she said with a sardonic lift of her brow. “When you said I didn’t like running SparkSignal. That what I like is building something new. So Nanofiche is the next ‘something new’. Encryption and compression. Cheap. Reliable. Keys kept out of dangerous hands.”

  The numbers and timelines swam in front of my eyes and I looked from the strangely well thought out documentation to the blonde genius crossing her arms and leaning back against the table. She’d looked so undone a moment before. But she was back to cocky, back to knowing there were very few people as good as she was at what she wanted to do.

  And it slammed into me all at once: she was serious.

  “How many people?” I asked, as though that were anywhere near the most important question.

  The sly grin on Iris’s face said she knew my mouth was running on autopilot. “Two. Just us, so far. And Carrie,” she allowed. “I predict five hundred by Christmas. It’ll move quickly once the prototype is finished. I want you running public relations and marketing from the drop. No lost ground to make up, no missteps from the Misanthrope of Silicon Valley. Your plan on the starting line.”

  Five hundred. Yikes.

  And she wanted — she wanted my plans? My plans when I couldn’t keep hold of the last company she’d built? I was on the verge of hysterics.