by Delaney, JP
You frown. “Tim didn’t lose his head. He lost his heart. It’s not the same.”
“Maybe,” Mike says, shrugging. “But you didn’t exactly fight it. You only had to mention some designer’s name and Tim was beating on their door, buying you the latest dress or bag. Which, as often as not, you’d take back and swap for something you liked better. He had terrible taste, as you often liked to remind him.”
The clothes in the walk-in closet, you think. Those expensive boho-chic labels. “Are you saying I was some kind of gold digger?”
Mike shakes his head. “Tim was well aware some women only wanted him for his money—founder-hounders, they’re called around here. He was pretty good at spotting those. And to be fair, you weren’t materialistic. But you did lap up his attention. You were on the rebound from some toxic relationship or other, and I guess it felt good to be adored.”
His coffee cup is almost empty now. Absentmindedly, he turns it around by the top with his fingertips as he speaks, as if it’s a dial he’s slowly cranking up to maximum.
“Tim couldn’t see the problems. To me they were clear as day. People say opposites attract, but study after study shows it’s actually similarities that make for solid long-term relationships. Similarities—and pragmatism.
“When Tim gives you his full attention, it can make you feel like the most important person in the world. Add to that the whole jet-setting lifestyle—the houses, the cars, the red carpets, the fundraisers—and it’s a bit like you’ve bought into a fairy tale. But that’s just on the surface. Really, his life is about the all-nighters, the funding deadlines, the endless emails, the coding crises. That’s what motivates him and consumes a hundred percent of his energy. People like Tim need quiet, supportive partners who are happy to stay in the background. Not grand passions that only serve to distract them.”
Mike sounds almost sad, you think. And with a flash of insight you realize what really happened back then.
Mike was jealous. Back in the garage, he’d had Tim all to himself. Little by little, as the company grew, that relationship had become diluted. But at least it was still all about their baby, this enterprise they’d created together.
The last thing Mike would have wanted was for Tim to fall in love with someone outside the company’s magic circle. To be diverted from the mission.
You don’t say any of that, though. Instead, you say mildly, “And now? What’s your problem with who I am now?”
“Where do I start?” he says with a rueful smile. “Don’t get me wrong—it’s nothing personal. And losing your wife is a tragedy I wouldn’t wish on anyone, let alone my best friend. After you died, Tim pretty much fell apart. And the company almost fell apart with him—after all, he is the company, as far as our backers are concerned. Then, about a year later, he suddenly announced he wanted us to start working on an AI with emotional intelligence. I thought it was a sign he was finally getting over you, thinking about the business again. So I said, Sure, let’s go for it.”
You doubt Tim had been asking for Mike’s permission, but again you keep the thought to yourself. “And?”
“Oh, he threw himself into it. His determination was extraordinary, even for him. He drove our employees like a bastard—some couldn’t take it, but Tim just went out and hired more, irrespective of cost. It was eighteen months before he told me what his plans really were. I couldn’t believe it. Everything we’d done—every cent we’d borrowed, every mortgage we’d signed, every all-nighter we’d pulled—had all been about you. And now that he’s got you…”
“Yes?”
“For all the millions we’ve spent, what have we actually proved?” Mike asks quietly. “That we have the technology to build a very approximate replica of a dead human being. Yes, it’s a breakthrough, but—so what? Only a man deranged by his own grief could think that’s a direction society should be traveling in. How does it make the world more productive? What does it change? Nothing—it simply fossilizes the past. People die—it’s a tragedy, sure, but there are other people to fall in love with, and so life goes on. Compared with driverless cars, or nanosurgery, or even a drone delivery for your groceries, you’re a cul-de-sac. Extraordinary technology, yes. But yoked to a pointless application.” He stops. “At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what Tim would have said about it, if it had been anyone else but him and you.”
“He loves me,” you say defensively. “Some men build a memorial. He built an AI.”
“Memorials bring closure. You’re the exact opposite. Think about it—for as long as you exist, he’ll never get over the death of the real Abbie, or know what it is to have the love of a new woman in his life. At best, you’ll only ever be a pale shadow of the person he once loved. How is that a meaningful relationship? Another woman, someone who isn’t Abbie Cullen and isn’t even trying to be—that woman might have had a chance of healing him, of helping him move on. And now she’ll be denied that chance. Your existence deprives Tim of the very thing he was trying to achieve.”
You feel a flash of anger, not least because you can see Mike’s point. “And if he had moved on and met someone else, you’d be jealous of her, too. You’d resent her for being the focus of his attention, instead of you and your precious company.”
Mike smiles thinly. “You think you’re the first to say something like that to me? I know my place in Tim’s life. I made my peace with it long ago. Sure, I stand in his shadow. But that’s a pretty big place. And I’m lucky enough to have a rock-solid marriage of my own.”
“To Jenny. One of your own employees.”
“To Jenny,” he agrees. “The most brilliant programmer I’ve ever worked with. Who understands that a long-term relationship is about kindness and compromise and yes, hard work sometimes.” He closes his laptop. “The good news is, you’re working fine. But that may be down to good luck rather than good coding.”
There’s a ping from across the room. Guiltily, you turn toward it, thinking it might be the iPad, but then you realize it’s just your phone. You go and pick it up. Another text.
Love u too. How u doing? Not bored? x
“Tim?” Mike asks.
“Yes.” Quickly you text back, All good! X
“Did you tell him I’m here?”
You shake your head.
“I think that’s the right decision. We’ll keep this between ourselves.” Mike starts winding up his computer cable. “This is something you’ll soon learn, Abbie. With Tim, honesty is not always the best policy. The secret to managing him successfully is to be selective.”
“I’m not trying to manage him at all. He’s my husband.”
Mike doesn’t reply for a moment. Then he says, “You know, we have something in common, you and I. We both want what’s best for Tim. Just remember how fragile he still is, would you? The very last thing he needs is any more emotional upheaval. Any more hurt. Right now, that could destroy him.”
His eyes hold yours. You realize he isn’t talking about the tests he just carried out—in fact, you’re pretty sure those were simply a pretext, an excuse to come here and have this conversation.
Mike’s warning you about something. Something you don’t even know yourself yet. But whatever it is, he wants you to keep it a secret.
13
When Mike’s gone you go and look at the iPad. Thirteen percent charged now. You thumb the switch. The Apple logo appears, followed by a message saying the operating system needs to check for updates.
Finally, a keypad appears. iPad requires passcode after restart.
You search your memory for numbers that might have some significance for you. You try your birthday, then your year of birth. Each time the iPad shakes the screen. Wrong.
You grimace, frustrated.
The simplest thing, of course, would be to tell Tim. He could give the iPad to his tech people to unlock. You put it on the table, where
he’ll see it when he returns. But then you stop.
If there are secrets on that iPad, they’re your secrets. You didn’t want Tim to know about them back then. Until you know what they are, isn’t it best to play it safe and say nothing, at least for now?
And then there’s Mike’s warning. If whatever’s on the iPad will cause Tim grief, it might be better for him not to know about it.
You try not to listen to the small voice inside you that’s saying, You’re worried it’s something that’ll make him think less of you.
Because the thought has crossed your mind: What if, before you died, you were having an affair? You have no memory of that, obviously. But from what you’ve understood of Tim’s explanations, your memories were constructed from your digital footprint—social media, texts, emails, videos, and so on. By definition, anything you kept hidden from the world would be a blank.
You don’t think you’re the sort of woman who would ever be unfaithful to her husband. You love him. But if you can’t remember, how can you completely rule it out?
And then there’s that book. Who was it you were infatuated with, exactly? Tim? It seems unlikely, somehow, after so many years of marriage. And if it was him, why hide the book away?
How horribly ironic it would be if, after he’d spent five years obsessively re-creating his perfect wife, Tim discovered within a few weeks that she wasn’t so perfect after all.
You stare at the front door, thinking.
There’s a tiny phone shop near the corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez that does iPad repairs; or used to, five years ago. You remember there was a handwritten sign in the window: SMARTPHONES/TABLETS UNLOCKED.
It’s time to leave the house.
FOUR
Who was the first to add her on Facebook? It was probably Bethany or Jen; it would have looked creepy if it had been one of the guys. But because we had pretty much all friended one another anyway, one day there she was, showing up in our “People You May Know” feeds, initially with one friend in common, then two, then twenty. Abbie Cullen was accepting us!
So now we knew not only what she was like in the office, but also what she did with her weekends, what her family looked like at their last Thanksgiving, and what her political opinions were. (Not that they had been hard to guess.) She “liked” other artists, mostly, supporting their shows and openings, but there was enough detail on her timeline to satisfy our curiosity in other areas, too.
We learned that she had started off as part of an all-female collective that built surreal metal sculptures at rock festivals. We learned that her parents were divorced, and that her father was a minor celebrity, an East Coast academic who had fronted several thoughtful TV documentaries. We learned what she looked like on a surfboard (impressive), on vacation in a swimsuit (stunning), and which college she had attended. (That she’d gone to Stanford was both a surprise and a cause for delight: Many of us were graduates of that institution, although we had majored in subjects like mathematics and symbolic systems rather than art.) We learned—and this caused a minor flurry of excitement, or would have if we had not been carrying out these researches privately, covertly, each on his or her own initiative—that according to Google’s image-recognition app, the heavily tattooed young man in many of her timeline photographs was Rick Powell, frontman of the Purple Fireflies, who—again according to Google—was now in a relationship with Heidi Joekker, the Victoria’s Secret model.
Was Abbie newly single? We wondered, but Facebook wasn’t saying. One of us would ask her eventually, though. We were sure of that.
We didn’t expect it to be Megan Meyer. Megan was not one of us. She was a Silicon Valley dating coach whose company, Meyer Matching, specialized in pairing high-net-worth executives. Her website made no secret of her fees, which were—frankly—astronomical: fifteen hundred dollars for the initial interview, twenty-five thousand for entry-level membership, which guaranteed at least one date a month, and five thousand for a one-to-one coaching session, which might encompass anything from a fashion consultation to practice dates. Oh, and if you settled into an exclusive relationship with one of your Meyer Matches—each of whom was personally vetted by Megan herself—you coughed up a bonus of fifty thousand. For the big triple M—a Meyer Match Marriage—you were talking $250K, payable every five years, for as long as the marriage continued. Given those kind of charges, it was no surprise that her clientele came almost exclusively from the C class—CEOs, CFOs, CTOs.
The first time we spotted Megan in Tim’s office, a few years back, it caused a ripple of interest. But on reflection, we felt almost sorry for her. The very fact that Tim had summoned her to his workplace for the initial interview suggested she’d bitten off more than any matchmaker could reasonably be expected to chew.
Shortly after, a profile appeared on her website, under the heading BACHELOR #4:
ARE YOU A MATCH FOR BACHELOR #4?
Our bachelor is an extremely successful entrepreneur; passionate, dynamic, and motivated.
As CEO of his own highly successful start-up, he has many demands on his time. But he is also someone who thinks deeply about the future, and is now fully committed to finding the right person to share his own future with.
A man of extremely high standards, used to making far-reaching decisions on a daily basis, he believes he would know within minutes whether he had met his lifelong partner.
His perfect match is 22–25 years old, petite, brilliant, and ambitious. She has feminine curves, unfussy hair, and a natural, healthy appearance without heavy makeup, tattoos, or colored nail polish. She will likely have a background in molecular biology or calculus. She is smart, poised, loving, family-oriented, nurturing, altruistic, and a nonsmoker. She is excited to forge a remarkable future with a world-class partner.
Candidates should apply, in writing, here, with a CV and six recent photographs.
That had been a while ago now, and if Tim had been dating since, we certainly weren’t aware of it. (There was that thing with Drunk Karen at the summer party: No one was surprised when, a few weeks later, now-sober Karen quietly moved on.) Megan strode into the office from time to time on her three-inch Manolo Blahniks, showed Tim some headshots on her iPad, then went away again, shaking her head. One time she was heard to sigh loudly as she climbed into her top-of-the-line convertible Jaguar.
About three weeks after Abbie started her residency, Megan came in for one of her usual sessions with Tim. But afterward, instead of leaving, she followed Abbie into the break room. Sol Ayode was in there, assembling a bagel, so he heard it all.
“Megan goes up to Abbie all bright-eyed and smiley,” he reported. “And Megan’s like, ‘Hi!’ And Abbie goes, ‘Hi!’ right back. Then Megan introduces herself and gives Abbie her card, and Abbie says sorry, she doesn’t have a card to give in return, because she’s an artist. So then there’s a bit of discussion about Abbie’s art. Then Megan asks her straight out if she’s ever considered signing up with an executive dating agency, because she—Megan—happens to have some really good clients she thinks Abbie would be perfect for.
“To which Abbie says—” At this point Sol paused for dramatic effect. “Abbie says, I don’t think a dating agency’s my kind of thing. Whatever happens, happens, right? To which Megan says, No, really, we vet all our clients personally, you couldn’t hope for a better introduction to some of the most fascinating and successful men in the Valley. To which Abbie says”—another pause—“That’s really not what I’m looking for.
“Oh? says Megan. So what are you looking for? And Abbie goes…” Here Sol was clearly torn between his desire to insert yet another dramatic pause and his eagerness to deliver the next line just as quickly as he possibly could. “Abbie goes, Well, my last relationship was polyamorous.”
Her last relationship was polyamorous. Of course it was. What did we expect? She was an artist. She was so much cooler than us.
It was Ryan—workshop Ryan, not developer Ryan—who was the first to speculate, after hearing this story, that Megan Meyer might not have struck up a conversation with Abbie on her own initiative, but had actually been acting on Tim’s instructions. Had he expressed an interest in Abbie, even then? Or—we soon built on Ryan’s suggestion—had Megan picked up on Tim’s interest somehow and decided that, if a relationship was in the cards, it was better that it happen with her own involvement, and therefore commission, than not?
And if so, had she pointed out to her client that Abbie barely met a single one of his stated criteria, from her height right through to the occasional hand-rolled cigarettes she smoked by the fire escape?
The fact is, we didn’t know if this was what had happened or not. But it fed into the obsessive mythology we had already created around Tim Scott. So that was what we chose to believe.
14
You find a coat, then—remembering the disgust in the eyes of the Uber driver who brought you home—add a hat, scarf, and dark glasses.
At the front door, you hesitate. Tim didn’t actually forbid you from going out, but he certainly warned you against doing it too soon.
Screw it, you think. You can’t hide away at home forever.
As you reach for the door handle you catch sight of yourself in the mirror. You look ridiculous. You take off the scarf.
Once through the gates you turn right, heading south. When the sky doesn’t fall in, you start to feel less tense. A jogger runs past with a dog on a leash. Both ignore you. A young Latino gives you a brief glance, but it’s one of appreciation, nothing more. A child in a stroller smiles at you tentatively. His mother, chatting on her phone, doesn’t even look in your direction.