“Yeah! You totally embarrassed me.”
“I was also embarrassed. I had no idea you were going to propose. And in public. Those people looked at me like I was a terrible person.”
“I mean, if you loved me, I don’t think it would have been a problem. You’ve always been obsessed with your work. Even this is about your work. You care more about your job than you do me.”
He was right. Something inside of her sagged at hearing this. The fear of losing the sacred recognition as a star employee had always plagued her. Since junior high, she’d had this deep-seated desire to be needed, wanted, recognized. When she was a child, her grandmother had told her that Emma had a gift and that she needed to use it. To not make the same mistakes she had. Too many times she’d heard how her grandmother had never had the opportunity to make anything of herself and that, when her husband had died, she’d had nothing.
And now Emma also had nothing. Without her grandmother, parents, or any family she was close to, all she had to rely on was her work.
It was so easy with Jeremy because he allowed it, but she shouldn’t have let things go this far. Now they’d found themselves here, at this juncture, with her leaving and him still upset with her.
She reached for his hand, unable to keep the tears at bay any longer. “Jeremy . . . I am sorry. I should have realized earlier on that we looked at things so differently.” She grappled with words, anything that would help him understand. “Like two incongruent angles. Similar but just not the same in terms of how we feel.”
“What? Don’t compare us to a triangle.” He grimaced, slid his hand away, and stood up fast, knocking his chair over, and then awkwardly picked it back up. He met her eyes after a dramatic pause, and she almost had to look away. “I thought we were a circle.” And with that, he grabbed the pizza box and wine and stormed out of the room.
She stood up to chase after him and then heard the door slam upstairs, and she sat back down. Her head collapsed on the table, her eyes following the path Jeremy had taken out of the room. And probably out of her life.
She texted Jordana as she wiped at her eyes. Well, that didn’t go as planned. What was that list about?
So you could put him back together after you break his heart, and escape in the middle of the night.
Way too soon.
She slammed her phone down, only to hear it buzz again. She tilted it up on its side to peek at whatever snarky follow-up Jordana had written. But it wasn’t Jordana; it was Maria.
Why did Jas just call me and say that there are issues with you and Rishi working together?
She sat up straight. What was this? Had Rishi contacted Jas before she’d even talked to her new boss?
I don’t know. I bought him a coffee and tried to talk to him. Then he ran out and I haven’t seen him since. It was sort of the truth.
Patch up whatever is going on. Otherwise, there might be a rationale for the new job arrangement to change. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.
Emma swallowed. She would fix this. She had to fix this. Her livelihood depended on this new job, a relocation, and a chance to save Helix.
Will do! Don’t worry.
The worrying was going to all be on her. Tomorrow she would have to salvage whatever she’d done to Rishi and reverse her scoreboard so it was at least even.
CHAPTER 8
It was late, the cubes were mostly empty, and the hum from the army of vacuums that flooded the building each evening had already started down the hall. Emma had been busy, talking to Jas and trying to prove she wasn’t a terrible person. She could only imagine what Rishi had said.
She hadn’t confirmed whether or not Rishi had fabricated his “that’s my team” declaration, but from Jas’s behavior on the call, she could assume that maybe there was a bit of truth to it. The company was competitive, and yes, she felt bad, but it wasn’t as if she’d asked to work on the project knowing she’d be taking it from him. She’d lost her fair share of opportunities, too, but none of those projects had she owned so completely as Helix. She was emotionally invested, but why did Rishi care so much?
They might have their differences, but this app needed to be the best it could be, and she needed Rishi on board. Maria had made that clear.
She walked toward the kitchen, and that’s when she spotted him in the conference room at the end of the hall. Through the strip of clear glass that stretched at table height across the wall, he huddled over his laptop, staring at the projector screen. She’d recognize that messy head of hair anywhere, that nose like an eagle’s beak. She strode toward him and, when she was ten feet away, rethought her strategy. She needed the right words to ask him to get on board. And explain how it had all happened. Surely he’d understand. It wasn’t as if she was like some of her other spotlight-hungry colleagues, who weren’t above stealing code or bad-mouthing others to get ahead.
His eyebrows were hunkered over those cement eyes of his. He was intent on something. His pupils scanned the screen, studying, analyzing. This was work, hard work from the look of it. But this late, hidden inside a corner conference room, it seemed like he was doing something secretive. Maybe even sneaky.
He did seem a bit odd. Crashing his mug into hers. Insisting she cc him on her team-apology email. A little crazy and a bit overly confident—his posture was something out of a chiropractic manual, very un-coder-like. In an odd way, he reminded her of that guy on the bus next to her last week who’d petted the air beside him and kept saying, “This is my dog, Precious. Do you want to pet her?” He’d seemed very confident as well.
Maybe Rishi was better looking and didn’t smell like hay and stale beer with a slight tinge of urine. He smelled more like a dark forest with something spicy in the air. But if he truly thought she’d stolen his job and was out for revenge, he could be the kind of guy who would try to sabotage her.
This could be Robert all over again. Robert, who’d stolen her code and presented it to their VP as his own. But she’d been naive back when she’d first started at TechLogic, and she was excited about her first job. Her new career with coworkers who seemed as enthusiastic as she was about working for an innovative startup. Robert had been so kind in offering to review her code, since she was new. And then, in a day’s time, he’d robbed Emma of all the recognition she’d deserved as he presented her work as his own. When she’d brought this up to her manager at the time, he’d said he believed her, but at this point it was just Robert’s word versus hers. And now that asshole Robert was a freaking director already.
She should be over it now—it was years ago—but it wasn’t fair. Even with Maria’s coaching and counsel, rage still burned in Emma’s stomach when she thought about it. Just because she had been young and trusting and didn’t try to weave a web of bro talk, she couldn’t claim credit for her work.
Well, she wasn’t that trusting anymore; Robert had seen to that. She didn’t know what was going on in that conference room. But she would find out.
No one else was around. Emma slunk over to the door of the room and slipped down to the floor. She crouched behind the wooden partition that rose two and a half feet from the ground. This way she could peer through the glass strip along the wall, and Rishi wouldn’t notice her. If she had to get down on her knees and crawl like a baby to see the code projected on the screen, she’d do it. She had to be certain that this new job was not going to be swiped from her, like everything else in her life.
The dim light and quiet hum of the projector screen provided the perfect setting for what Rishi had to do. The white noise was almost meditative, like the chanting of a priest in a temple. And this was Rishi’s temple, his place to sit quietly with his thoughts, remember his purpose, and achieve clarity. One hundred percent fixated on his goal. He had to be.
It was almost 8:00 p.m., and he’d waited for most of his colleagues to trickle out of the office, which meant no one would interrupt him. He’d devoted a good portion of his twenties to the study of programming. Enough that he should
have been able to create a simple web crawl. Just simple code that, with some precise word selection, would venture out into the depths of the internet and surface up the key contenders for the perfect wife—and, like magic, his ideal woman would appear.
The ideal woman for him and ideal woman for his parents, as if this unicorn lady existed. If she did, then he had to find her soon. His parents had already thrust one profile into his inbox that afternoon, and it had been one day since he’d told them he was coming back to Bangalore rather than staying in the US.
His two closest friends, John and Aamir, had already married and were now siloed off in their new married world, where they were getting to know their wives better in newly married bliss. Now they were busy, too busy for him, hanging out with their new wives’ friends and their husbands. Rishi’s evenings at the pub had been dramatically reduced now that they had other priorities. He’d been resigned to a pity case. John’s wife had said more than once, with a “poor you” look, that she’d be on the lookout for him.
If only she knew what a task that was.
He pulled up the code he’d written the first time a few years ago, after Sapna had broken up with him and he’d told his parents he was ready. The candidates his parents had provided proved just how unready he was to settle down with anyone. No one could compare to her. But the code he’d written had failed beyond anything he could have imagined. Maybe he’d been too busy with work back then to devote enough time to its development. Web crawls weren’t his strength, and it wasn’t like he could ask his colleagues for help. He scanned it over. What had gone wrong?
He’d put in all the parameters he’d wanted in a wife, then for his parents some key words they would insist on. After all, this was a “marriage of families,” as people liked to say. The caste, the community, his state—all the things his parents needed for the girl to be considered a good match. So how had the star contender ended up being a Russian prostitute living in Lucknow?
He shook his head.
Maybe he needed to wipe it clean and start over. Or give up on the whole idea altogether. Or just settle for the next woman his parents threw across his path and hope things would work out. Rely on fate to make his decision for him. After all, it seemed to be working for Sapna.
A bump on the glass wall behind him made him jump. He whipped around just as a pair of green eyes ducked away through a clear strip of glass between the frosted panes. “Emma?” The last person he expected to see, especially on the floor. And the last person he wanted to witness his vain attempt at a web crawl.
Her muffled voice came through the glass, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. “What?”
She straightened up, shuffled around the corner, and opened the door. “I dropped a pen, and then I couldn’t find it. It just kept rolling . . . ,” she said, shrugging a little too much, like a bad actor who’d hit the coffee a little hard that day.
He looked toward the hall. It couldn’t have been that challenging to find a pen in an empty hall. How they’d picked her to lead the project over him was truly a mystery. “Okay . . .”
“What are you up to?” Emma’s eyes jerked toward the screen.
Rishi wheeled around in his chair and unplugged the projector from his laptop as fast as possible. Emma had a reputation as an expert web crawl programmer. Yet another reason he was pissed she was leading the app. The last thing he needed her to see was his motley code, a sad copy/paste bypass toward marital bliss.
She glanced up at the now-blank-and-blinking projector screen, then back at him, studying him. Suspicion all over her face. If she saw the code on-screen, broken parts and all, he’d never hear the end of it. Even if he wasn’t working on her team, she’d walk past him in the Bangalore office with her entourage, whispering, “Nice code,” then snicker with her new team about how he’d run out of the coffee shop, so convinced the Helix app project was his. Or leave sticky notes on his monitor with little hearts drawn on them, striking him in the chest with their bared insults. #BASIC4EVER. He’d seen her embryonic maturity in action.
“Oh, you know . . . just trying to finish up some stuff.” He tried to stay calm, but he was pretty sure his breath was rapid fire, in and out, out, out.
She hummed like she didn’t believe him.
He looked at her hands. She didn’t even have a pen. “Where’s this elusive pen that kept rolling away from you?”
Instead of answering him, she leaned against the wall. “I wanted to resume our conversation, if you have a minute?” she asked, peering at his laptop screen.
Rishi leaned on the table, blocking her view. “Okay, but can we do it tomorrow morning? Maybe we can go to that coffee shop again?” He was sitting at an awkward angle, tilted toward her, propped up by his elbow. He just had to act totally normal. Like this wasn’t cramping his back, and he sat like this all the time. He was hiding nothing. Nothing at all. “I’m kind of busy at the moment.”
“It’ll just take a few minutes.” She sat down in a wheeled chair and pushed off the ground, propelling toward him. But when she reached him, one of the chair’s wheels broke off. Emma tried to stand up, likely to keep from falling, but tripped and stumbled onto Rishi. She landed with one hand on the table and one hand on his chair arm and then hovered over him. And then she didn’t move.
Well, this was awkward.
Heat radiated off her chest and into his, their breath mingling in the five inches between their faces. His heart thudded deep and low in his chest. The tension of her body so close to his made him feel strung on a rope, unable to move, vibrating with the fear of looking in her eyes for too long. Or what would happen if he moved. If he rolled back two inches, she’d fall on the floor. She would probably face-plant in his lap. He swallowed hard.
Her voice was just over a whisper. “Rishi, are you already doing something with the Helix app?”
“What?” He shook his head to empty his mind of whatever was happening to it, muddled by her proximity. Of all the things she was going to say, that was the last one he’d expected. “No, and can you move? You’re stepping on my toe.”
She adjusted her foot. “Oh, sorry.” She pushed herself up to standing. “But Rishi, there is code on your screen, and you’re obviously trying to hide it from me.”
“This is. Not. The. App.” Rishi seized his laptop and moved it out from in front of her, snapping it shut.
“Then why are you being so sneaky about it?”
A mix of frustration, anger, and humiliation rifled through his chest. “It’s none of your business.” He packed up his laptop.
She slumped on the conference table and sighed, muttering to herself, “What’s wrong with me?”
He’d like to know what was wrong with her too.
Her foot was propped up on the broken chair, and she sank over her thighs, cradling her head in her hands. “You’re right. It didn’t look like Helix. It looked like a web crawl.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“Look, Rishi, I’m sorry if I interjected into another project or something; I’m just on edge. I’ve had a really rough week, and in the past I had a bad experience with someone taking credit for my work, and I’m a little paranoid about it. I know you’re upset with me, and that’s just where my mind went.”
He spun around, his backpack almost flailing off his shoulder. With a deep breath that made his shoulders settle as he stared into the air in front of him, he spoke. “You know, you’re not the only one who’s having a rough week. You’re not the only person in this office. And I’m betting no one barged in on you while you were working in a conference room after hours and interrupted something important you were doing. And that person was the last person you wanted to see because she stole your job from you.”
“I’m really sorry. Seriously, I didn’t know the job was supposed to be yours. I am not the kind of person who would do that. I swear.” She peeked up through her hands.
She did look sorry. In fact, he was afraid she might cry. “Excuse me.�
�� He swept past her and toward the door before things could get any more awkward.
“Wait, I’ll go with you. Can I make it up to you? Buy you a drink?” Emma hopped up and followed him out the door. No one was in the office at this point, except for the custodian vacuuming the carpet in a faraway, dimly lit corner while monitors flashed reminders that they were still on.
She took a turn behind him, and relief slowed his pace. She’d given up. He said a thank-you to whoever was listening. But after he reached the elevator, he heard a clattering noise in the distance, and she emerged around the corner of the hall, run-walking toward him while stuffing her laptop in her bag.
“Drink? Please?” she said breathlessly. “I want to prove to you that we can work together.”
The elevator dinged its arrival. She was giving him this half-sorry, half-crazy expression as they stepped into the elevator together. This could be his future. Every day, watching as she held his job in her hands and struggled to do in a week what he could do in an hour. Since she wasn’t an app coder, she’d just delegate to them all, bossing them around like a tiny coder dictator. The pressure built up in his chest like a balloon.
“Emma, I can’t work on your team, and I think you understand why.”
“But you can. I promise! Is this because of the doughnut thing at my postmortem? I told you I was sorry. I cc’d you on my email to the team, didn’t I? Just like I promised.” She was begging now, her voice two octaves higher than it had been when she was oh so confidently informing him about “her new team in Bangalore.”
The door dinged on the ground floor, and he walked toward the dusk settling around the street outside the glass walls. He couldn’t reach the street fast enough. The give of the door handle at his palm was one more step away from this office. One more step away from how everything had gone so wrong. The evening air brushed past his face with the promise of rain. The busy sounds of the dinner crowd on the sidewalk and the guitar strumming from inside a bar were a welcome escape from the white noise of his laptop as he struggled with his code. Behind him, though, Emma’s voice pleaded. “Come on, Rishi, please? I really want you to work on my team.”
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