The Next Big Thing

by Sadie Hayes

She looked at him, not trying to hide her annoyance.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he finally conceded. “Happy?”

  “I’ll be better after this,” she said, taking a sip of her martini. Violet knew that her temperament was difficult to track: Sometimes she was cool and easygoing, but other times, like right now, others’ tardiness made her irrationally angry. For the longest time, Ted Bristol had been playing right into her hands. As she expected, after their conversation on the golf course when Violet teased him with her knowledge of his ownership of Doreye, he predictably gave her another assignment. Also as she expected, this time the assignment came with a bigger paycheck. But as she’d sat waiting for a tardy Ted Bristol, she became anxious that she’d overplayed her hand. She worried that she’d admitted to knowing too much, and now Ted was taking her for granted. She resented the implications of his showing up twenty-five minutes late to an appointment he himself had scheduled and wondered whether she should ditch him and their arrangement altogether.

  “Well, I didn’t have the best day, either.”

  Violet took a breath and tried to muster an ounce of caring. “Why is that?”

  “I got my first distribution from the Gibly sale.”

  “Why is that bad?”

  “It’s insulting to have to see the number.”

  “It’s your own fault.” She was sick of his constant moaning about Gibly.

  “What?” he snapped back at her brusqueness.

  She met it with equal authority. She’d long since forgotten she was almost thirty years his junior. “You mishandled Amelia. You shouldn’t have let her leak what she knew about Gibly’s security.”

  “How would you know I mishandled her?”

  “Because I understand people.” Her voice oozed passive-aggressiveness.

  Ted scoffed, “I should have offered her more.”

  Violet shook her head. “Jesus, you don’t get it at all. Our generation isn’t like that.”

  “Everyone can be bought, even your over-idealizing, social media–bred generation.”

  “Maybe. But not with money. That was your mistake. You used the wrong currency with Amelia.”

  Ted huffed a sigh. “I didn’t come here to talk about this. How’s Adam?”

  “Didn’t you just play golf with him?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  She lifted her eyebrows and sipped her drink triumphantly, relishing that she didn’t actually have to say “I know everything.”

  “Whatever.” Ted rolled his eyes at Violet’s confidence. “I told him he had to start making money. And should sell the data.”

  “You should have stuck to the first point; he’s still conflicted on the latter.”

  “This has to work.” Ted looked at her seriously.

  “Don’t get emotional.” She met his gaze. “Our interests are aligned.”

  “So your backers are still on board?”

  “Yes. But they don’t know about you, and they can’t: They still blame you for Gibly.”

  “Gibly was Amelia’s fault.”

  “No,” she said patiently. “As we’ve established, it was yours. But now you’ve got me to make sure things go smoothly. You’ll get what you want out of this: Doreye will have a massive pop in value and you can sell and recoup your money. And I’ll get what I want.”

  “You mean what your backers want?”

  “Ted, I may be a hired hand, and you may think I only exist to do your bidding, but you don’t know me at all if you think I don’t have my own motives for this.” She knew it was wise to keep Ted thinking she was a blind executor of his and his British counterpart’s ideas, but it was starting to grate on her pride.

  A camera flash from the corner of the room made Violet turn. A party had assembled at a large table in the corner and a group of overdressed men and women her age were laughing and snapping photos. She wondered sometimes, seeing crowds like this, whether she shouldn’t have just gone to college and been a normal kid after all.

  “So we’re square on the new goal? We just need Adam to agree to it,” Ted said, bringing her back.

  “Yes.”

  “How is the other deal going? The cloud-computing thing?”

  “Fine. It’s working and he feels like a hero and he trusts me to make good deals.”

  “And Aleister is happy, too?”

  “Of course. This’ll make the other piece that much easier with them.”

  “Very good.” Ted smiled.

  “I have to go to the restroom,” she said abruptly, sliding out of her chair and straightening her skirt as she walked to the back of the restaurant.

  A ruggedly handsome man with olive skin and slicked hair, dressed in jeans and a fitted tweed blazer, held back the curtain that blocked the hallway to the restrooms from the rest of the restaurant. His deep brown eye caught hers and he nodded his head politely as she passed. She felt herself blush instinctively at the attention, and as she exited the bathroom a few minutes later she found herself hoping he’d still be there.

  “I’ve unfortunately got to go.” Ted was tapping at his iPhone and stood up as he saw Violet return.

  “It’s fine,” she said, taking a last sip of her martini and reaching for her coat. “I think we were finished anyway.”

  “Keep up the good work,” Ted said, leaning over to kiss her cheek casually.

  She pulled back but accepted the gesture.

  “I think we make a good team, you know,” Ted said. “Always have.”

  She squinted and studied his face. The waitress approached the table. “He’s got it,” Violet told the waitress, indicating the check, as she headed to the door.

  As she walked back to her car, Violet saw the man from the restaurant, sitting on a bench on the opposite side of the street reading a newspaper. It was chilly out and he wore a gray overcoat, but looked untroubled by the wind as he sat cross-legged reading the paper. She stood for a moment to see if he’d look up, and then thought for a second maybe she should just go over, but then thought better of it and walked on.

  53

  Mind Over Body

  Adam was lying on his back on the floor of his office, his hands folded gently across his abdomen. He’d pulled the blinds so that the room was dark, save for the sunlight creeping in around the corner of the curtain. He stared up at the white ceiling made blue by the dark. He was thinking.

  On the one hand, Amelia had always been the person he trusted the most, and she would never sell user data. On the other hand, Amelia was gone and replaced by Ted and Violet, two people who believed in him and valued his contributions. They both thought he should sell data, and Violet had even found a buyer. Moreover, he hadn’t talked to Amelia since Roger Fenway’s funeral. She hadn’t wanted to sell the data last year, but if she knew what he knew, maybe she would have come around?

  He sat up. Yes, exactly. He couldn’t make this big of a decision based on what he thought Amelia probably wanted. Just look at how much his views had changed in the past year as he’d learned more about business: Surely hers had similarly evolved—or would have if she’d approached the world with as open a mind as he had.

  It felt very clear all of a sudden. He needed to sell the data. Violet was right; it was best for the company. And it was wrong for him to make any decision based on Amelia. It was irrational and emotional and not even grounded in reality, as he didn’t have any factual basis for knowing what she wanted.

  He stood up and walked back out into the light of the hallway toward T.J.’s desk.

  “I’ve made a decision.”

  T.J. looked up from his laptop. “What’s that?”

  “I found a buyer for our data. We’re going to go into contract with them before the end of the quarter. I’ll have the team write an app update that links user data to their database. We’ll start with the iPhone app and then move to Droid.”

  T.J. tilted his chin down and peered up at Adam. “You want to sell user data?”

  “It’s the best th
ing for the company, and for users. It’ll quickly generate revenue without forcing us to charge our users or run ads.”

  “It’s unethical,” T.J. said shortly, his inner voice screaming, It’s something my father would do.

  “That’s an archaic way of thinking. You don’t have any way to prove that it’s bad for users.”

  “You don’t have any way to prove it’s not bad for them.”

  “But I can absolutely prove it will generate revenue, and that will help the company develop more products, and those products will benefit them.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “Doing the update won’t hurt.” Adam went into charming negotiator mode. “And we’re not committing to anything by having the conversation with potential buyers.”

  T.J.’s face didn’t move, he just stared at Adam, studying him.

  “What about Amelia?” he finally said. “What about what she wanted?”

  “How do I know what Amelia would want? I haven’t spoken to her in months.”

  T.J. scoffed, “Don’t be a fool.”

  “I’m not,” he insisted genuinely. “She left. And if she’d stayed her opinions on the matter might very well have evolved, as mine have.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” T.J. blurted. “Are you delusional?”

  Adam kept his face calm, insisting on his previous argument. “There’s no way of knowing.”

  T.J. ignored it. “So you haven’t heard from her?”

  Adam swallowed and shook his head silently. “Have you?”

  “I found out she went to Indiana, but T-Bag hasn’t heard from her since.”

  “Well, I guess there’s nothing we can do but move forward,” Adam heard himself say, his heart jumping. Why did she go to Indiana?

  T.J.’s jaw dropped. He stood up and pushed past Adam. “Go to hell.”

  * * *

  T.J. hurried down the stairs of the office, suddenly desperate to get out into the fresh air. It was all too much: needing to get revenue and Amelia being gone and Adam being a douche bag and Riley having a boyfriend and all of it overlaid with this new lens that he had daddy issues.

  He walked to University Café and headed straight for the back counter to order a coffee, his eye catching a pretty girl typing away at her laptop in the front corner. No, he thought. No more women. Not right now.

  Maybe Adam was right. It was the best thing for the company and for investors. And three months ago he wouldn’t have even hesitated. But now, now his whole foundation for what was right or wrong felt shaky.

  He paid for his latte and went around the bar to wait for it. He took a deep breath and looked at the tables of chatting diners and furiously typing nerds at their laptops. His senses suddenly flashed back to a year ago and his meeting here—at that table right there—with Roger Fenway. He replayed the encounter, the salad he’d ordered and how Roger had been distracted and then gone and talked to that girl who was sitting at the table in the front corner. That girl had ended up being Amelia Dory, the girl who had changed everything in his life.

  T.J.’s brain jumped to a moment earlier. That pretty girl when he’d walked in—could it have been Amelia? Or was his brain just trying to bring the memory of her back to life? To go back to before all this started? He slowly crossed the café, secretly praying it was true, but when he arrived at the table again, she was gone.

  54

  The World Wide Spider Web

  “Not here. Meet @ City Hall parking garage instead.”

  Amelia texted Dawson as she scurried out of University Café with her head down, her whole body tense with the expectation that someone was about to call out her name. She should have known better than to agree to meet Dawson in such a public place. She’d hardly been waiting for ten minutes before T.J. had come in for a coffee.

  Her heart fell when she saw him. She knew her fear of being seen and having to explain what she was doing put her on edge, but there was something else troubling her. As soon as Amelia saw T.J., all the feelings she’d tried to push out—the feelings of longing for and missing him—came flooding back and she helplessly indulged the memory of his hands on her waist as he hugged her good-bye and felt his breath on her neck when they sat close at Gates. But he hadn’t even looked when he came into the Café. Whatever was there—if there had been anything there—he’d probably let it go by now.

  He’d e-mailed her eleven times since she’d left for Tahoe, the first few asking where she was; then he shifted, giving her updates while insisting he respected her silence and that he didn’t expect a reply. The last e-mail had just said he hoped she was okay. That was eight days ago.

  T-Bag and Riley and Patty and even Lisa had e-mailed, too. (Adam hadn’t.) It was the e-mails from T.J., though, that made Amelia’s breath stop when she saw them in her inbox, and which she found herself reopening late at night, rolling the words around in her head, thinking about what T.J. had been thinking about when he wrote them, and landing on the conclusion that made her heart melt: He’d been thinking about her. She wanted so badly to talk to T.J., especially when she started doubting her theory, thinking it really had been as simple as Adam wanting her off the team. At those moments she’d come so close to sending a reply. Yes. Let’s meet. Thank you, really.

  But in the end she hadn’t.

  She had to focus, she told herself. She’d never, ever been distracted by boys, and now was not the time to start.

  The late-afternoon sun was fading into evening and taking what warmth it offered with it; Amelia jammed her hands into her pockets and walked quickly across the street, ducking into the parking garage below City Hall and following the ramp down to the bottom level, where a few cars were parked but most employees had already left for the day.

  “You’re going to love me.” Dawson’s voice startled her as she turned to meet him. He unbuttoned his overcoat and pulled his iPhone from the inside breast pocket of the tweed blazer he wore as he approached.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Amelia answered, but felt her heart racing with nervous excitement for what he might have found.

  “I did like you showed me and used your little app to track the phone of the person who’s receiving the mysterious payments, and”—he held out the phone and offered a picture—“she’s quite the looker.”

  Amelia snatched the phone, her palms sweating nervously. The photo was dark and showed a woman sitting in a beige upholstered chair at a table with a white cloth, daintily fingering a martini. Amelia pulled the phone up toward her glasses to get a better look: Could it really be? “Violet,” she heard herself breathe.

  “You know her?” Dawson asked.

  Amelia’s head was spinning. A year ago, VIPER was paying the Aleister Corporation in London for its Gibly data—now they were paying Violet in Palo Alto? The same Violet who had posed as a reporter to reveal Amelia’s past, the same Violet who feigned a company called RemoteX to steal Doreye’s thunder, the same Violet who’d shown up at the Forbes photo shoot and been hanging on her brother ever since?

  “What is she doing?” Amelia asked the air.

  “Keep scrolling,” Dawson urged, watching Amelia’s face with a satisfied smirk. “She’s got a companion.”

  Amelia swiped her finger across the screen to the next photo. Violet stood up to greet someone. A man’s back entered the frame. The next image showed the two talking intently, but Amelia couldn’t make out his face.

  “I can’t tell who it is.” Amelia lifted her eyes to Dawson for help.

  “Keep going. I got one with a flash. Almost got me caught, but you can make him out in it.”

  Amelia kept scrolling until she got to one where both their faces were crystal clear. “Ted,” she said firmly, her jaw instinctively setting.

  Amelia’s weight dropped back into her heels and she looked up, mouth agape. She started to nod as she put the pieces together. Ted was linked to Violet. Did that mean that Ted had a role in her other dealings—as a reporter and with RemoteX and
… with Adam?

  Amelia was still angry with Ted. It went deeper than being insulted that he’d thought he could pay her off way back when they first met at University Café to discuss what Amelia uncovered about Gibly. She was angry with him because he’d ruined her illusions about Silicon Valley: It wasn’t a clear, clean place where innovation happened for innovation’s sake. It was full of manipulation and greed, and Ted Bristol embodied all of it.

  She swallowed with effort and finally lifted her head to Dawson. “This man. This is Ted Bristol. This girl … her name is Violet.”

  “How do you know them?”

  Amelia started to explain but changed her mind when she looked at Dawson. His eyes had a glimmer, a hunger for information that she still didn’t trust. She gestured toward the time on her iPhone to indicate the urgency of getting to the bottom of this new revelation. “It’s a long story; I’ll explain later.”

  “No hints?”

  “Better you’re not swayed by my suspicions.” Her brain felt clear now, and she had a new energy that her instincts were right. See? she said to herself. No need to call T.J.—you’re fine on your own.

  “Fair. What do we do now?”

  “I need to figure out how they’re connected. Give me a few minutes.” Amelia opened her laptop and perched herself on the trunk of a nearby Audi. She connected to the building’s Wi-Fi and was quickly sorting through encrypted FedEx shipping records from last December. It took her a minute to find the RemoteX delivery records. In another forty seconds, she found the credit card that paid for the delivery. And twenty seconds later, she found the address associated with the credit card, which Google Maps showed to be a mansion in Atherton. Ted Bristol’s, in fact.

  So Ted was the puppet master behind RemoteX. Amelia remembered how he first tried to get revenge on her by taking her and Adam’s scholarships away. When that didn’t work and Roger bailed them out, he must have set up RemoteX to get revenge on Amelia through embarrassment. But that didn’t work out, either. What else would this man resort to? What had he done next? She couldn’t shake the feeling that Ted was the mystery investor. But how? And what was he plotting to do if he was?