by Sadie Hayes
But it wasn’t just that he was tired; it was that Amelia wasn’t here. And he knew that was the real reason, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
He couldn’t celebrate. Not without Amelia here, and especially not without knowing where she was. Every time he thought about her, or about trying to accept the congratulations he was receiving, he felt a pang of unresolved guilt, like he was a little kid who broke the cookie jar and was now waiting for a time-out. Except in this case, everyone knew he broke the cookie jar but no one was willing to give him his punishment.
Amelia wanted Doreye to be free. As the number of downloads increased and the investors clinked their plastic champagne flutes, he knew they were calculating the company’s value and how their portion of the success would affect next year’s family budget. The downloads didn’t feel like success to Adam, they felt like one hundred thousand little jabs reminding him that when the kegs were rolled out and the party was cleaned up, he’d be expected to deliver real revenue. Charging for Doreye or selling user data or any responsible revenue strategy would go against everything Amelia stood for.
He wondered what she’d think now: whether she’d be able to celebrate all these people loving the thing she’d created if she knew he was going to start making money off of it soon.
He’d worked up the courage three weeks ago to ask T.J. to invite Amelia to the launch party. T.J.’s response was short, admitting that he didn’t know Amelia’s whereabouts. There was anxiety and loss in T.J.’s voice as he confessed that he was starting to get worried. Adam was surprised, but he wasn’t concerned for Amelia’s safety; he didn’t believe in telepathy, but he’d always been able to sense when something was wrong with his twin sister, and he didn’t have that sense now. Weirdly, he had the sense she was doing really well, wherever she was. As for himself, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was on the verge of doing another very bad thing.
“Hey mister.” Violet suddenly appeared by his side, knocking her hip flirtatiously into his. She was bright and smiley and full of energy, the way people are when they’re excited about something new or have had too much Red Bull.
“Hey.” He smiled and returned her kiss on the cheek, a European habit she’d maintained and which he no longer misinterpreted as sexual. “You’re in a good mood.”
“I’ve got an idea,” she said, and bit her glossed lip mischievously. Adam hoped the idea was sex—that she would take him back into the office crash pad and finally hook up with him, an up-until-now nonoccurrence that was starting to make him insecure. She’d been so aggressively forward when they’d met—or rather, remet—in San Francisco, but she’d never actually acted on any of her flirtations, only ever going just so far.
“What is it?”
“Well…” She nodded her head in a dramatic pause. “You know how you have to turn all of these downloads into dollars?”
Adam’s heart sank. Not only was he not having sex, but it was not yet three hours after launch and he was already confronted with the revenue conversation. “Can we at least wait until the party’s over to talk about that?”
She lifted an eyebrow and smiled sarcastically. “What? Because you’re enjoying this party so much?”
He shrugged.
“Listen,” she said, punching his shoulder. “I found a buyer. For your user data.”
“Excuse me?” Adam shifted uncomfortably.
“You can’t start charging clients for your service; it’ll turn a lot of them off, and you’ll have to get involved in all sorts of payment nonsense that’ll eat into company funds and take focus away from the product. This eliminates all that. Just sell the data you’ve already got. You don’t even have to format it: Just give a buyer access to your database.”
Adam turned his face away from her. “I don’t want to talk about revenue right now.”
“Your investors sure do.” Violet gestured toward the PKC hyenas scarfing down tacos.
“So your idea is—what?—the path of least resistance?”
“I called in a lot of favors to find you this buyer, Adam. And lucky you; they are willing to pay so much money that you’ll never have to think about revenue again. And you can continue with business as usual: acquiring users.”
Adam turned to look into Violet’s eyes. They were bright above her smile, filled with genuine excitement and belief. He could tell she was proud of the deal she’d sourced and that it made perfect sense to her for Doreye.
He let out a breath and turned his face back toward the room. “Amelia wouldn’t like it.”
He didn’t look up but could feel her smile disappear.
“I think it’s time to stop thinking about her,” Violet snapped in a low voice. “She’s gone, Adam. You can’t make decisions around her anymore. Not that you ever should have; she almost destroyed the company.”
“That’s my sister you’re talking about,” he snapped back.
“You’re the one who fired her.”
“And whose idea was that, initially?” He glared at her.
“Forgive me for saving your company. And trying to save your ass now, too.”
“Can we please just not talk about it right now?” Adam conceded.
She looked at her iPhone. “Fine. I’ve got to go anyway.”
She lifted her head proudly as she turned to leave, brushing past T.J., who was standing next to the keg with a group of engineers, slowly sipping his beer and looking curiously at Adam, now standing alone.
48
The Best Laid Schemes of Mice and Men
A mouse scampered up the wall next to her and Amelia jumped, startled, almost dropping her laptop. She shook her head, trying not to think about it and to focus instead on her computer screen. The room was dark except for her computer’s faint blue glow. She tried to ignore the sound of the mouse lightly scratching, and instead turned her attention to the buzzing of the processor and the overhead ceiling light.
Michael Dawson was sleeping in the next room. He’d offered the room to her, but Amelia preferred to crash on the couch, near the computer, even if it meant being closer to the mice.
They’d been lucky to find a place at all: Even East Palo Alto, the downtrodden other-side-of-the-tracks neighborhood near the illustrious downtown “artery of Silicon Valley” had gotten expensive with the recent boom of IPOs. But Amelia and Dawson had cobbled together a $1,000 living budget, which afforded them a month’s rent in this basement one-bedroom apartment in East Palo Alto. They now had fifteen days before Dawson had to head back to Indiana to meet with his parole officer, and they were still far from figuring it out.
She no longer overthought her partnership with Dawson: She needed his help, and that was clear. She was too naïve, too trusting; in order to get Doreye back she needed a partner unafraid to pretend in public. Amelia could do the hacking to find out who was behind taking Doreye away from her, but she needed Dawson to track them down and bring them in.
In Tahoe, it had dawned on her that Adam wasn’t to blame for her being fired. He was the one who had pulled the trigger, yes, and that wasn’t nice or good, but whereas cheating was in Dawson’s nature, cruelty wasn’t in Adam’s. She suspected he’d done what he thought was right, only he’d made that determination using wrong information. That realization lifted the fog that had been clouding her: She could forgive Adam and focus on what and who had caused him to think it was the right thing to do. Once she figured that out, she could get back both the company and her brother.
She decided to start where it all began—with Gibly. She’d always found it peculiar that the Gibly deal had gone through after all, even if it was at a much-discounted price. One year ago she had exposed layers upon layers of shady dealings: Gibly’s secret database full of user information, the unbelievable price tag from the Aleister Corporation, and the secret payments to Aleister from a mysterious entity called VIPER.
Retracing her steps a year later and under very different circumstances, Amelia once again daisy-chained into the basic security of
the Aleister Corporation. She searched through the finance portal and found that the payments from VIPER stopped one year ago, right at the time her anonymous TechCrunch exposé was published.
Now she sat at her computer screen and cross-referenced the VIPER account number to see what other types of companies it was associated with. The round icon on her computer twirled, thinking, before revealing another checking account located in the United States.
Her heart froze, and she clicked to open it.
“Ugh!” she silently moaned. It was, of course, restricted. “How do I figure out who they’re paying now?” she asked the computer.
She sat back in her chair again and stared at the screen. She chewed her gum, which had long ago lost its flavor, and thought. Finally she sat up, placed her fingers across her keyboard, and began furiously coding.
Three hours later the morning light was starting to creep in and Amelia had deciphered that the bank coded individual accounts differently than entity accounts. The restricted account, 4XX-XX-XXXX, was an individual, not a company. A little more searching revealed a call record from a 650 area code: That was the Bay Area. She tried tracing the number: unlisted.
“How’s it coming?” Dawson’s sleepy voice startled her.
“Good,” she said, keeping her eyes on the screen and her fingers typing rapidly. “I got a phone number.”
“For what?”
“The person receiving payments from VIPER.”
“What’s VIPER?”
“A shell company that used to pay Aleister for the user data from Gibly.”
“What’s Gibly?”
“The company that got sold to Aleister.”
Dawson grunted, realizing he wasn’t going to follow this rabbit hole. “So what’s the point?”
“I need to figure out whose phone number this is. They’re the ones receiving payments from VIPER.”
“Can you tell where they’re located?”
“Somewhere in the Bay Area. But all the names are coded. There isn’t a yellow pages for this type of thing.”
“Why don’t you use Doreye?”
“What?” She was only half listening as she typed, annoyed with his questions.
“You’ve got the phone number, right? So why don’t you program that fancy app of yours to locate the cell phone associated with that number?”
Amelia turned in her chair, her brow scrunched as she processed what Dawson had proposed. Finally, she nodded. “Right. Yes, that’s exactly right.”
Dawson shrugged arrogantly at her previous annoyance. “I do what I can.”
“And then we can take it around town, I mean, like a metal detector, and find who it is,” Amelia said, turning back to her laptop.
“Bingo.”
Amelia launched the code for Doreye for the first time in two months and got started.
49
Not Just Ones and Zeroes
“I owe you an apology.” Patty was looking down at her hands, which were folded in her lap under the table at Woodside Bakery.
Lisa said softly, “What happened?” She glanced at the waiter and shook her head so he wouldn’t come over to take their order. It had been weeks since the girls had seen each other, since Lisa recounted what happened at her first Focus Girls session and since Patty went on her Focus Girls one-on-one to prove Lisa wrong.
“You were right,” Patty said quietly. She knew that Lisa had heard rumors about the cop at Rosewood and the subsequent hold she’d placed on Focus Girls, but she’d finally mustered the courage to ask her to brunch and apologize in person. She twisted her hands in her lap and watched herself do so, too embarrassed to lift her eyes to Lisa. “I still can’t believe it; I mean, I can’t believe how stupid I was to think—”
“Stop it.” Lisa reached her hand under the table to grab Patty’s.
Patty felt ridiculous for lots of reasons, but particularly because Lisa had been the one to finally tell her what was going on. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Lisa a lot, but she’d always seen herself as older and wiser, even if their birthdays were less than a year apart, and there was something about having a freshman expose Patty’s blind spot that was particularly humiliating.
“Look at me,” Lisa softly demanded, and Patty obeyed. “This is not your fault.”
“Yes it is.” Patty felt her voice crack. “I started the company! And I let the whole thing go on without even noticing—without even thinking. It’s entirely my fault: How could it be anyone else’s?”
“You had a great idea,” Lisa insisted. “You have a great idea. And you never had the intention of it becoming what it did.”
“But I should have seen what was happening. I should have realized—”
“When?” Lisa cut her off. “When would you have had time to notice? You were running a rapidly growing enterprise and you were going to school and you were having a life.”
“I wouldn’t be so certain about that having-a-life part.” Patty shrugged, suddenly feeling incredibly sad about all the parties and brunches she’d missed while working on a company that had come to nothing … worse than nothing.
“All you can do is move forward,” Lisa counseled. Patty looked at her, eyes brimming with tears, and felt even worse. Not only had younger Lisa seen what Patty naïvely could not, but now she was turning Patty’s attempt at an apology brunch into a make-Patty-feel-better session. On the other hand, it was nice to have the empathy. “What ended up happening with the cops?”
Patty shrugged. “I wasn’t technically doing anything illegal, so they couldn’t press charges. But you should have heard what this cop said to me. When they brought me down to the station he said my behavior was ‘unbecoming of someone with my upbringing’ and that he questioned a future where people ‘of my morals’ were able to start companies. I mean, he basically called me a terrible human being.”
“Oh, Patty, I’m so sorry.” Lisa turned her lips into each other. “But you know you can’t listen to that—he was just trying to get to you.”
Patty shook her head. “No, that’s the thing. He was right. I mean, I’m a bad person. Like, really a bad person.”
“Stop it.” Lisa shook her head and looked at her menu. “I’m not listening to that. Let’s order.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Patty insisted.
“What?” Lisa looked up. “Patty, you are not a bad person. You made a mistake, that’s all. Everyone makes mistakes. You’ll learn from this mistake and you’ll be fine.”
“I kissed Chad,” Patty blurted.
Lisa’s face went white and her jaw loosened. “What?”
“I kissed Chad. Well, we did other stuff, too,” Patty admitted. “Chad cheated on my sister … with me.”
“When?”
“It started at T.J.’s graduation party.”
“Is that why they—”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to Chad since December. Shandi’s never said anything, and I feel like she would have if that had been the reason, but I don’t know.”
“Wow.” Lisa’s eyes were wide.
“See?” Patty insisted. “I’m a terrible person.”
Lisa shook her head. “No, you’re still not.” She paused. “Or if you are, I’m much worse.”
Patty snorted. “Please. You’re perfect. Literally.”
Lisa shook her head before admitting: “I was in love with Adam Dory. Like, really in love.”
Patty scrunched her face. “What are you talking about? How do you even know him?”
“We were together, Patty. Since you introduced us at T.J.’s graduation party last year. He and I just … clicked. But even though I felt like it was love at first sight, I never stopped dating Sundeep.”
Patty sat back in her chair, trying to process a world in which Lisa Bristol—perfect, angelic Lisa Bristol—cheated on her boyfriend Sundeep with a loser like Adam Dory. “What happened?”
“He found out,” Lisa said, and sniffed. “I mean, Adam found out about Sundeep.�
� Then she said quickly, “As soon as I met Adam I was going to break it off with Sundeep—I really, really was—but then his family disowned him, and every time I tried to tell Adam, he said something or did something and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“But what about now? Sundeep’s gone, why can’t you legit date Adam?” Then she made a face and added, “Though God knows why you’d want to.”
Lisa ignored the jab. “He wouldn’t do it. He hates me.”
“Whatever. You’re the best he’ll ever do by like a thousand. I’m sure he’s still totally in love with you.”
“No. He’s changed.”
“Do you still love him?”
“I still love the old him. Not the new him.”
“You mean the successful, TechCrunch-covered entrepreneur? It must have all gone to his head.”
“No; he changed before the company launched. It’s hard to even be happy for him after what he did to Amelia.”
“Seriously.” Patty took a sip of water, her tone getting serious. “I’ve been trying to track her down for weeks. I was hoping Amelia would be able to help extinguish the Focus Girls Web site in case the cops change their minds about wanting to press charges.”
“I haven’t seen her all quarter, either. I e-mailed her about getting coffee but never heard back. I figured she was avoiding me because of all that happened. I wish she knew that I’m on her side with the whole Adam thing.”
Patty cocked her head. “You don’t think she’s in trouble, do you?”
Lisa’s face showed concern. “I don’t know.”
Patty felt her heart start to race thinking about Amelia being in trouble and no one knowing. She was the kind of person who could disappear for days without talking to anyone. Suddenly, Patty’s desire to track down Amelia was no longer a selfish one to use her friend’s computer skills, but a genuine concern for Amelia’s safety.
“We have to find her,” Patty blurted.
Lisa sat up in her chair, and Patty could tell her mind was similarly racing. “T-Bag.”
“What?”
“T-Bag. He’s Amelia’s Comp Sci friend. He must know.”