Who Rescued Who

by Victoria Schade

  chapter two

  Exhale stress, inhale serenity,” Elizabeth chanted as she waited for Whitney to pick up. The mantra did nothing to calm her, but she repeated it to keep from thinking too much about what she was doing. She crossed and uncrossed her legs and tried to find a comfortable position on the couch before her friend answered. Whitney Brinkman was the closest thing she had to a bestie, even though their time together was confined to office hours and the rare networking cocktail party.

  No one at Duchess used their phone to call unless it was a servers-are-down emergency. Elizabeth tried to imagine what Whitney was thinking as her name flashed on her screen. She straightened her posture and took another not-calming breath.

  “Elizabeth? What’s wrong?”

  “Whit, hey, nothing’s wrong.” She forced cheer into her voice. “I was just thinking about you and I thought I’d call. I, uh, I miss you.”

  “Oh, how cute. That’s adorable! I miss you too, girl.” Whitney’s voice was a roller coaster of inflection and added syllables, so that the word girl almost sounded like gorilla.”

  “How are . . . things? I mean, can you talk?”

  “Actually, I can’t. You know how it is, ugh, annoying.” Elizabeth could almost hear the eye roll. “So, what’s up?”

  “I was actually hoping we could hang soon. I could use a friendly face, you know? I’m feeling sort of bleak these days.” She sniffled. “I’m going to Black’s tomorrow and I thought maybe you could meet me for a quick coffee?” Her voice trembled like she was a fifth-grader talking to a crush. “Just to catch up, I promise we won’t talk about Duchess.”

  “Aw, fun!”

  Elizabeth waited for an actual yes or no during an awkward silence.

  “Do, uh, do you think you can? I’m flexible, I can be there any time.” She squeezed her eyes shut as she realized how desperate she sounded. “I’ve got something in the morning but any time after ten works for me.”

  Whitney paused. “Hey, can I call you right back? In like two minutes?”

  “Sure, I’m around.”

  “Cool, byeeeeee.” Whitney was still saying the word when the call disconnected.

  Elizabeth threw her phone on the couch and imagined sitting across from Whitney at Black’s Coffee. It didn’t matter that Whitney was a monologist who forgot that Elizabeth also had a life. She just wanted a hug and a single comforting word. In the three weeks since her sacking she’d come to understand why shunning was a weapon.

  Her new phone’s unfamiliar ring tone jolted Elizabeth out of her trance. Maybe Whitney would also want to have dinner with her over the weekend? She was excited to firm up their coffee date, but when she flipped her phone over there was a strange number instead of Whitney’s smiling profile photo. She’d trained herself to pick up all calls, hoping that a headhunter with an unlisted number might remember that she was a star with just one black mark on her record. One giant, career-ending black mark.

  “Have I reached Elizabeth Barnes?” The British-accented voice didn’t sound like yet another reporter or blogger trying to get a sound bite out of her.

  “Yes, speaking.”

  “Finally, it’s you.” The man exhaled and sounded relieved. “I’ve been trying to reach you for quite some time. I’ve sent several emails as well. Have you received them?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure who I’m speaking with.” She smiled as she spoke, hoping she sounded welcoming in case the man was calling about a job. Would a headhunter have that much trouble finding her? Did she need to revisit her LinkedIn page? “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “My apologies, I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s so much to say. This is going to come as some surprise, I’m sure.” The man paused for so long that she thought the call had dropped. “Elizabeth, I’m your father’s brother, Rowan Barnes. I’m your uncle.”

  It was as if he’d told her he was the tooth fairy. “Oh, I think you’ve got the wrong person; my father didn’t have a brother. You must have me confused with someone else.” She flipped her phone away from her face to see if Whitney had texted while she was talking with the stranger.

  “Of course, he didn’t tell you about me.” The man sounded like he was talking to himself. “Well, we’ll get to that eventually.”

  Elizabeth’s internal alarm pinged. She’d heard about postfuneral scams, where “missing” relatives came forward to claim their part of the deceased’s inheritance. Most people probably fell for the accent, but having grown up with British-accented parents, she was immune to it. Her father’s estate was a modest one, and there was barely anything for her let alone any long-lost family members. And six months was a long time to wait to come forward.

  “I don’t think I’m who you’re looking for. I know my father was an only child.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Elizabeth, there is so much to say,” the man said with a sigh. “First, let me begin by telling you how sorry I am for your loss, and how deeply I regret waiting this long to get in touch with you. I have been trying, but technology is beyond my reach, I’m afraid. I’ve only just tracked down your mobile. But let me get to the reason for my call, and then we can determine what to do next. Clive, I mean, your father, was in line to inherit a parcel of land, even after he’d left. He chose not to respond when it came time to claim it, so it passed to me. But I’ve always known in my heart that the land by the river is not mine. My wife, Trudy, and I agree that it was always meant for your father. And now that he’s gone, this bit of Fargrove is yours, Elizabeth.”

  Fargrove.

  He’d gotten the town correct. And the way he spoke sounded so familiar.

  “You can do with it what you like,” the man said when Elizabeth didn’t respond. “We just can’t keep it in good conscience.”

  For a moment it felt like she’d just won the lottery. But it was a scam, it had to be a scam. There was no brother and there was no land. She scolded herself for almost falling for the sweet-sounding senior citizen.

  The man continued to fill the silence. “Now, I know the news of who I am has caught you off guard. I still have the original documentation about the land that I’d like to send as proof, and then we can discuss what to do next.”

  Proof? Elizabeth would need a notarized deed to even begin to believe what she was hearing, but if she agreed to it she’d be able to end the call and wait for Whitney to get back to her.

  “This is a lot to process,” Elizabeth finally responded. “I’m not sure I understand, but I’ll take a look at what you send.” She gave him the address for her junk mail account. “I really do think you have the wrong person, though.”

  “Oh, but I’m confident that we’ve finally found you, Elizabeth Afton Barnes.”

  He knew her middle name too?

  “Before we hang up, I feel I must . . .” He paused. “I feel I must invite you to visit. You simply have to see the land. And . . .” He seemed to struggle to say the words. “And we would love to meet you, your aunt Trudy and I. But there’s time to arrange it, so look for our message and please respond. Yes?”

  He sounded so sweet and hopeful that she played along.

  “Of course, I’ll get back to you, I promise.”

  She hung up and realized that her life had become an alternate reality where nothing made sense. Perhaps the quaint-sounding scammer knew she’d been fired and guessed that she’d be an easy target. She’d just ignore the email and then block his address.

  Twenty minutes had passed since she’d hung up with Whitney. No call, no text. She was probably busy dealing with the usual Duchess drama. Elizabeth closed her eyes and imagined what was going on there and felt an ache in her chest. Had someone moved into her office yet, or were they keeping the door shut like it was contaminated?

  Elizabeth had tried to keep busy since the disaster at Duches
s, mining for contacts that might be able to see past the wreckage of the CNET interview. She’d only heard back from one person, who promised they’d meet for drinks “soon.” She’d stalked the rest of them on social media as she awaited their replies, and sure enough they weren’t off somewhere hiking a remote mountain or meeting with a guru in a land with no cell service. They were as active and witty as ever, and they were ignoring her.

  She was poison. Contagious. But it wasn’t her first time being untouchable. She’d lived through it before, and she’d fight her way through it again.

  She stared out at the premium San Francisco skyline and tried to ignore the fact that her overpriced Restoration Hardware couch was as comfortable as a bus station bench. She’d seen other much more spectacular face-plants in her industry. It was possible to recover. She had no choice but to recover, really. Duchess had paid her embarrassingly well, but her lifestyle didn’t allow for long-term planning, particularly without her options. Her rent alone in trendy SoMa swallowed much of it each month. Her fat savings account would be a memory unless she could come up with a plan.

  She looked at her phone again. Still no word back from Whitney.

  Her former colleagues, the people she used to consider friends, were still living their beautiful, carefully curated, fully employed lives in their social media streams. Elizabeth knew that they were watching her too, as no one had unfollowed her, including Cecelia. They were probably hoping for a spectacular flame-out, but no matter how low she felt she wasn’t going to let it happen. She had over fourteen thousand devoted and engaged followers—she called herself a micro-influencer—and even though she felt like the world’s biggest loser, she continued to fill her feeds with positivity and beautiful photos so they could see that she was still living her best life.

  No one had to know she was a liar.

  Elizabeth scrolled through her feed and stopped on a recent selfie. Her father had pointed out that one eye was higher than the other in her graduation photo and she’d never forgotten it, so she always tilted her head so that it was harder to see the defect. She hated the way she photographed, but she forced herself to include a selfie every few weeks, so people could identify with her brand better. She knew how to camouflage her flaws with the right angles and filters. In some of the photos she almost looked as pretty as the other influencers she followed.

  She knew she wasn’t stereotypically beautiful thanks to her cheekbone-free face and muddy-colored hair, so she worked hard to improve upon nature’s shortcomings with the help of a glam squad that sculpted her body, steamrolled her naturally wavy hair, and lasered her face to erase the freckles that kept popping up. Without her crew of health and beauty experts she was just average.

  Elizabeth gently touched the puffiness beneath her eyes. The stress of the firing registered all over her face, from the dark bags to the patch of pimples above her neglected eyebrows. Elizabeth Barnes had never lost at anything, and the crush of failure was so foreign to her that if she didn’t know better she’d have thought she was coming down with something. Wanting to stay in bed all day, getting clammy and light-headed every time she stood up, no appetite—the symptoms were all there.

  But she had no one to smooth back the damp hair from her forehead like her mother used to do when she was a girl. She thought back to the times when she was little, before her mom got sick, when she would wake up with a tickle in her throat. Her mom would make her stay home from school, ignoring her dad’s disapproval, and tuck her in on the couch under an ocean of blankets. She doted on Elizabeth, bringing her soup and ice cream and comforting hugs as they sat together watching daytime TV. After her mom passed, the theme song to The Price is Right made Elizabeth well up every time she heard it.

  She was so alone.

  Elizabeth had never had the bandwidth for a boyfriend. Sure, she’d had extended flings with fiscally appropriate guys, but nothing that qualified as a real romance. Just decent-but-not-great sex and a heart that never veered into pitter-pat territory. She was thirty-two and she’d never said the L-word to anyone but her parents. Now, though, she wished for a warm body beside her, to reassure her that everything was going to turn out okay. A rom-com boyfriend who told her she was beautiful and kissed her until her knees went weak.

  With every day that passed without contact from a living, breathing person, she felt a little more removed from humanity. The likes and hearts from strangers were her only connection to the world outside her apartment, which was enough for her until she realized that she was one slip away from dying and becoming a pile of liquefied goo on her bathroom floor. No one would notice she was missing for weeks.

  Because there was no one real who gave a shit about her.

  She’d learned to be self-sufficient when she was twelve, right after her mom died. Her little girlfriends began avoiding her on the playground as her mom got sicker, treating her like cancer was contagious, as if their own mothers might disappear if they spent too much time with Elizabeth. Her father told her that friendship was overrated, so she turned into the industrious girl, the one who studied so hard that she didn’t have time to play freeze tag. It didn’t matter that they had sleepovers without her; she was too busy achieving and hoping that each award might be the one that made her father proud. The memory of little girls with sleeping bags under their arms loading into minivans gave her a familiar hollowed-out sensation in her gut.

  For a second it sounded like the Priority Mail shipping box sitting on the edge of the table by her front door whispered her name, which meant that she was spending way too much time alone. Were hallucinations next?

  The box hadn’t moved in months, and she was past accidentally mistaking it for a package from Net-a-Porter or Neiman’s. Sometimes when she was ripping through her latest deliveries, she picked the box up and put a knife to the seam, only to realize in horror how close she’d come to slicing it open and seeing what was inside. She knew if she put the box in a closet she’d forget about it forever, so she kept it on the table, a final silent reprimand. Since everything in her life was upside-down, maybe it was possible that she did have an unknown uncle. Maybe, if it turned out to be real, which of course it wasn’t, maybe then she could finally be done with the box.

  chapter three

  There was no text or return call, but there was a chance Whitney was still going to show. Elizabeth had sent her a few messages, letting her know that she was going to be at Black’s as discussed. It wasn’t a surprise she hadn’t heard back. Whitney was gorgeous and flighty, which helped everyone forgive her for her inability to be polite.

  Elizabeth checked her phone for the millionth time as she waited in line. If Whitney was going to stand her up, she wasn’t sure why she’d even left her apartment. It felt like every real human surrounding her was silently judging her and determining that she was, in fact, a loser. But online, her life was still perfect, and she needed fresh content to post. She took her latte to a table in the back, arranged it just so on the rugged wood table, and snapped an off-centered photo. She wanted to look busy when Whitney showed up. If Whitney showed up.

  She smoothed the front of her black wrap tank and noticed a trail of deodorant dotted along the side seam. Elizabeth grabbed a napkin and attacked the stain, hoping she could get rid of it before Whitney noticed it. Whitney’s ability to laughingly point out shortcomings, like a poorly camouflaged pimple, was rarely funny to the person on the receiving end.

  The cloud-based photo-editing app Elizabeth used to manufacture her posts kept suggesting a greenish filter for the photo of her coffee cup, so she attempted to reset the app by reversing out of it until she came to the main page. She’d linked the app to her various social media accounts, and it cycled through random images from her accounts with suggested edits, like evening her skin to Barbie doll perfection and brightening her teeth until they looked blue-white. This time the photo the app suggested made her index finger tremble above the image.r />
  It was Cecelia’s smug face.

  Elizabeth thought that she’d erased all evidence of Duchess from her phone, but somehow there it was, like a final fuck you from the cloud. She zoomed in on it, trying to remember the context for the shot. Cecelia was sitting at her desk with Winston in her arms with just her laptop and a small stack of papers marring the vast white expanse. Elizabeth zoomed in more, trying to make out the words on Cecelia’s computer screen. She enlarged the image and realized that it was code.

  Entomon code.

  The backslashes, brackets, and random words wouldn’t make sense to anyone without a programming background, but Elizabeth could read enough code to know that she’d stumbled onto something huge. She changed the app filter a few times, hoping that a different contrast would make the characters on Cecelia’s screen stand out more. Elizabeth applied the Clarity filter and it was like shining a flashlight on it. Every last semicolon was visible.

  Elizabeth smiled her first genuine smile in weeks.

  She had proof.

  Proof that not only was Entomon real, but Cecelia was in on it the whole time. Releasing the photo would prove that Elizabeth had taken the fall for something that Duchess was trying very hard to hide. There was no way Elizabeth could release the photo herself, but there were other options. Geeky insider websites that could verify that the photo wasn’t altered, decipher the code, and then release it to news sites so that she could clear her name. And more importantly, so that she could take Cecelia down. The public would scream for Cecelia’s head when they discovered Entomon was real and downloaded invasive facial recognition software with their new games.

  Elizabeth had heard the rumors about the Entomon spyware but always filtered them out. Duchess didn’t need to cheat to stay on top. But when the reporter presented compelling evidence about Entomon during her infamous CNET interview, Elizabeth felt cornered. She sputtered nervously for a few minutes, then pivoted to accusing Duchess competitors of monitoring their clients. Her joke about other app companies surveilling their clients’ sexual habits was meant to be funny—she still regretted using the phrase gettin’ busy—but it turned out to be anything but.