by Lauren Wood
His position was far more pathetic than the existence of our company was wrong. I reminded myself of that as I packed everything up and headed downstairs to meet with the tech team.
It took over an hour to update them on everything and make sure they had all the information they needed. Then, they got to work while I supervised.
The head IT guy, Joe, explained to me that this was going to be a little trickier than they’d originally planned.
“Lucas alerted us to this guy months ago, and we got enough bad reviews to justify deleting his account. But as soon as we did, five more popped up in its place. He’s determined, that’s for sure.”
I stood over his shoulder, shaking my head. Who the hell was this guy and how did he have so much time to devote to this crusade against us?
“What do we know about him? Is Mark Silver even his real name?”
“Several of the accounts are under different names, so it’s hard to say. And they all have different photos and profiles...so it’s also hard to say what he really looks like,” Joe replied. “But we can track him down through his IP address and figure out who the real Mark Silver is.”
“Great. Get on that. Let me know as soon as you’ve tracked him down.”
I left them to their work and tried to carry on with my usual business, but I knew my focus level would only be at half-capacity with this troll mystery hanging over our heads. Thankfully, by the end of the day, Joe and his guys called me back down to see what they had uncovered.
“Here he is,” he told me, turning his screen around so I could see his social media profiles. “His real name is Mark Silver. And one of his profiles uses that name and his real photos. The others are bogus.”
I leaned down to get a closer look at the guy and was surprised by how normal he looked. The only thing abnormal about him was how good-looking he was. His main profile pic was pretty basic—a built guy with dark skin and hair flashing a charming smile in an expensive suit. But scrolling down to his gym selfies...phew. Those were the real killers. This guy was like something from a Calvin Klein ad when he took his shirt off.
I swallowed hard and tried to hide my hot, blushing cheeks. “Why is he creating profiles that make him look worse than he actually does in real life? Isn’t that counterproductive? It’s like the opposite of catfishing.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Mind if I look through this?” I practically shoved Joe out of his seat, and he was more than happy to take the opportunity for a coffee break—giving me a little alone time with Mr. Silver.
There was no clear info about what exactly he did for a living, but judging by the amount of leisure time apparent in his photos and this whole trolling endeavor in itself, along with his nice clothes and frequent traveling...it was safe to say he had some money.
I fell into a deep click hole, scrolling through pic after pic and post after post. He was nothing like I’d expected. I had envisioned a sad, below-average looking guy mouth-breathing night after night over his gaming computer in his mom’s basement.
But no. Judging from Mark’s social media accounts—he was far from any of those things. And the other intriguing piece to Joe’s report was this guy’s address...which just so happened to be in the city. I definitely couldn’t pay him a visit in person...could I?
2
Mark
It was a beautiful evening as I strolled home in the sunset. The weather was perfect—not too hot, not too cold. I’d had a long day and was looking forward to getting back to my place to relax. I was looking forward to it so much in fact, that I barely noticed the woman sitting on my stoop.
“Mark Silver?” She stood up the moment she saw me.
I looked her up and down, trying to guess what her motives might be. She was professionally dressed with long, dark, sleek hair and piercing icy blue eyes. As gorgeous as she was, she looked wound a little too tight, which put me on edge.
“Are you a cop?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Her brow furrowed. “No. Why? Are you expecting a visit from the cops?”
“No, but I imagine the worst visits you could get from the police are the ones you’re not expecting.” I pushed past her with my bagful of groceries under my arm and started to unlock my door. I wanted to make sure I was in a position to slam the door in her face if it was called for.
“My name is Camille Meadows.”
I stopped and turned towards her again. I knew that name.
“With Heartstr—”
“I know who you’re with.” I cut her off. “I just don’t know why you’re here.”
“I think you do know why I’m here.”
I smirked. “So, you are kind of like a cop.”
“It’s not my intention to interrogate you, but I do have some questions. Mind if I come in?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “No way I’m letting you into my place. Sit down and wait here. I’ll be back in a minute after I put all this away.”
“Wait.” She shot up the steps, placing a hand on my arm. “How do I know you won’t just go in there and lock the door and never come back out?”
“Well, I have to come back out eventually.”
She tilted her head, looking unamused.
I finally gave in, rolling my eyes and taking a seat on the front steps. I shoved my bag of groceries off to the side and groaned. “Alright. You’ve got five minutes. But not a second longer. I’ve got a pricy hunk of salmon in this bag and I don’t want it turning the wrong temp.”
“Salmon. Got it.” She lowered down onto the step beside me. “So, as I said before...I take it you know why I’m here.”
“I might have a good idea why.” I nodded. “I’m just impressed Heartstring would send someone all the way out here to meet with me in person. And one of the bigwigs at that.”
“You know who I am?”
“Oh, yeah.” I laughed. “I know all about you and your siblings. Your rich daddy left you broke, and you turned to scamming lonely people to rebuild your fortune. Even though none of you really seem to have much luck with love yourselves.”
Her face dropped, looking wounded for a moment. Enough to make me feel bad for taking such a low blow...razzing her family and all. I was going to add that I was sorry she lost her dad, regardless, but the hurt look on her face quickly evaporated into sharp anger.
“First of all, we don’t scam anyone. We provide a service. Sometimes it works on the first or second try. For others, it takes longer. That’s just the nature of human beings and says nothing about the quality of the service we provide. Second, I don’t understand why someone who is so against love wouldn’t just let a service like ours, which you’ve deemed useless for yourself, exist for the sake of others rather than try to ruin it for everyone else. Third, your love life can’t be that much better if you have the time and motivation to troll our app with all these dates.”
She let out a breath, finally, and waited for my defense.
“You scam people by even offering the service in the first place,” I argued. “But you’ve already taken up two of our five minutes. So, I’m not even going to get into that. And maybe some people are selfish enough to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing if it doesn’t affect them personally, but I’m not one of those people. And the love life thing…”
“What makes you so certain my love life isn’t thriving, anyway?” she proposed. “Maybe I just keep those things private.”
“Nothing is private anymore.” I grinned. “Obviously. You’re sitting here right now because of that.”
“Which I’m sure brings you great joy,” she quipped. “You were baiting us, weren’t you?”
“No, actually. I was only trying to do what I have always said I was out to do.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“Tell people the truth about love.” I shrugged. “That it’s a lie. At least romantic love is, anyway. People neglect a plethora of other kinds of loving relationships for the sake of romance and sex...wh
ich in the end, only gets people hurt.”
She laughed incredulously. “There are plenty of happily married people.”
“Are there?” I arched an eyebrow. “Name one.”
“My brother. Lucas Meadows.”
I burst into laughter so hard that it took me a moment to catch my breath. “Maybe your brother’s PR stunt fooled everyone else, but not me.”
“It’s not a PR stunt,” she insisted. “He has loved Victoria since we were in high school. It may have been an arrangement at the beginning, but they’re madly in love and very happy together. They’re expecting a baby, which I’m sure you must know since you appear to be so obsessed with us.”
“Sure,” I offered sarcastically. I wasn’t buying it for one minute. “I give them five years tops before someone starts having an affair.”
“I’ve come here to personally request that you stop this rampage against our company,” she said sternly. “I’m sure you’ve considered the legal actions we could take for defamation. But I’d really rather it didn’t come down to that.”
“I had considered it...until you showed up here. I’m a lot less worried about it now. A company like yours would have just slapped me with a lawsuit already if you could have. But they sent you instead. It’s an act of desperation because you know there’s nothing more you can do.” I stood and gathered up my groceries again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“No one sent me,” she snapped defensively, standing up with me. “I came on my own. Did you ever think that maybe my brother and I and all of us, the company included, aren’t what you think we are? Maybe not all relationships are what you think they are, either.”
“I think they all eventually become what I think they are. And if it appears otherwise, it’s because people are lying.”
She crossed her arms. “You have an awfully low opinion of people and their capacity to truly love others.”
“Romantically, yes. As I said. But I also said I have dinner to cook, so if you’ll step aside...I’d like to go inside my apartment now.” She was hesitant to budge. “Without you.”
“Cooking dinner for another bogus date?” she teased, finally stepping aside just enough to let me in.
As I slipped past her, I caught a big whiff of her fruity vanilla perfume. It was the little things like that which made women so tempting and addictive. I was just glad to be above it now. But in addition to being above that, I was also above her...by about a foot or more in height. And my vantage, as I geared up to unlock my door yet again, gave me a perfect view of her perky cleavage. I did my best not to stare.
“I think this little rendezvous was bogus enough of a date for me this evening.”
“Very funny,” she scoffed, making her way down the steps. “Mark? Do consider stopping. We can take legal action against you.”
“Then do it.” I smirked. “I can take legal action right back for false advertisement.”
She shook her head and stormed off back down the sidewalk. I found myself lingering in the doorway, watching her perfect butt as she walked away. I wondered if she was the hottest sister out of them and sending her was part of their tactic. Her sex appeal wasn’t enough to change my mind, but it was certainly enough to send me reeling.
I finally made it inside and did my best to shake off the remnants of our encounter. As I enjoyed my salmon dinner, cooked to perfection, I couldn’t stop thinking about how impressive it was that I’d had such a huge impact on their company—enough to bring Camille to my doorstep in person. I wondered if it was worth it to start trolling some other apps as well.
But targeting Heartstring had always been intentional. Other apps were developed long ago and were mostly experimental. Heartstring hadn’t been about seeing what would work. They knew it would work and be profitable when they began. And rather than ask themselves if it was ethical to prey on people’s desperation for love, they just went for it.
Yet somehow, the bigger question on my mind was...how the hell was Camille single? Sure, I had seen pictures of her before and knew she looked hot online. But damn...in person, she was a knockout through and through. And she seemed intelligent, driven, and determined. If a woman like her couldn’t find love...I was even more right in my theory than I’d originally thought. It simply must not exist.
I laughed at myself for dwelling on her so much, and still kept hearing her nagging words in my head...Was she just seeing someone in private? While I’d normally sit down at my computer in the evenings to schedule dates and respond to messages, that night I found myself doing more digging on Camille.
All I could find was the same info I had seen before. She’d put herself through business school to help with the launch of their company. She had a reputation for being cutthroat and was usually kept on the backburner to let her charismatic older brother, Lucas, handle the charming of clients and other partners when it was needed.
But outside of that? Nothing. No social media. No gossip or rumors. There were a bunch of honors, awards, and extracurricular activities covered in her impressive high school career. Head of the debate team and junior business league. She’d been president of a club specifically for budding career women. 4.0 GPA, graduated valedictorian. The list went on and on. Her college resume was even longer.
Her educational and professional backgrounds were beyond impressive, but there wasn’t a shred to be found on her personal life. I was more than just a little intrigued.
3
Camille
My brother, Joshua, was waiting for me in my office when I returned from Mark’s. By then it was dark outside, so I was more than a little surprised to see him.
“What are you doing here?” I scoffed. “Isn’t your usual clock-out time about noon? If you even bother showing up at all.”
“And you’re usually here grinding away well into the night,” he shot back. “So, I was just as surprised to find your office empty. I see I was right in thinking you’d be back before you called it a day. Where were you anyway?”
“What do you care?”
“Well, I got briefed by the tech team after I missed the meeting this morning, and I had a sneaking suspicion you might have been stupid enough to go see this internet troll guy.”
I threw my things down on my desk and crossed my arms. “So, what if I was? I was put in charge of handling this. Which you’d know if you’d bothered to show up this morning. I’m a grown woman. If I think meeting with this guy in person is what the situation calls for, then I think you should trust me.”
“My trust in you isn’t the problem,” he argued. “It’s this internet creep I don’t trust. Come on, Camille. Don’t play devil’s advocate with me on this. Is that where you were or not? You left Joe’s computer open with his address still on the screen. He reached out because he was worried that’s where you might have gone. He doesn’t think it’s smart either, for the record.”
“Yes,” I answered finally. “As a matter of fact, I did. This guy is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our tech team hasn’t been able to stop him. I wanted to get a sense of who he is.”
“Who cares who he is!?” Joshua fumed. “It could have been dangerous! I know you like to pinch pennies and all, especially for the company, but it’s not worth putting your safety at risk!”
“Says the guy whose only mode of transportation is a motorcycle...and who runs off with Lucas on the weekends to jump out of airplanes and go cliff diving.”
“Rock climbing,” he scoffed. “And plenty of people do it. It’s perfectly safe with the right equipment. Anyway, don’t change the subject.”
“He’s harmless, Joshua.” I rolled my eyes. “Oddly enough, he just seems like an average guy...aside from his weird, obsessive internet trolling hobby. Which is good for us. It means we may stand a chance at reasoning with him.”
“And were you able to?” His eyebrows raised. “Reason with him?”
I kept my lips pursed defiantly. “Not yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.”
“You are under no circumstances to meet with him again,” he barked sternly. “The tech team already said they could block him from the app.”
“He’ll just keep making more profiles! He already has!”
“They can block his IP address.”
“And then he’ll just make a huge stink to the press and claim we’re discriminating against him!” I shouted, trying to avoid getting shrill. But it was hard not to. I really didn’t like being told what to do, especially not by my younger brother who was the wild, irresponsible one out of the four of us.
“It would be better for our image if we could convert him,” I suggested.
“Convert him?” He gaped.
“Yes. Send him on a date that he actually gives a fair chance. We could extend an offer of more personalized matchmaking to compensate for his previous bad experiences on the app. Find him someone he really hits it off with.”
He considered it for a moment, dragging his hands down his face with a long sigh. Joshua was never good at strategizing or dealing with stress. It was just another reason he tended to take a backseat with most company catastrophes...or really any business at all.
“I’ve got this under control, Josh,” I assured him. “Just let me handle it. I’m sure you have some party or club opening to go chase bimbos around at.”
“Very funny, Camille. At least I have a life,” he barked before storming out.
I felt a momentary tinge of guilt for giving him a hard time, but I quickly put it aside. After all the work my other siblings and I had to do to make up for his frequent absences, I was not about to be the one made to feel bad.