Page 21 of Gifted & Talented

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Meredith Wren felt sure she was going to kill someone, as she often claimed to feel, though as Jamie had pointed out to her the day prior, all evidence suggested she didn’t have the stomach for murder. This was meant to be a neutral statement on Jamie’s part, but Meredith had taken it as an assault on her character.

“Of course I could kill you if I really thought it was necessary,” she had told him in the car. “I could kill anyone if the circumstances were right. That’s the thing, really. I’m just above any sort of moral absolutism. Sometimes the circumstances do prescribe an unlikely moral course of action, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Meredith, I think you’re doing the thing where you just say words in any order to avoid voicing anything meaningful,” said Jamie, which had set Meredith off again. But we don’t need to focus on the conversation with Jamie right now. We’ll inevitably come back to that.

At the moment, Meredith was contending not only with her stye, which was definitely worse today than it had been yesterday and she felt certain everyone else had noticed, but also the knowledge that she had placed all her eggs in the spineless basket that was her business partner, Ward.

That morning, Meredith had awoken in bed with Cass, picked up her phone to start her day as she always did—arranging her schedule and producing a to-do list that she would then attend to with a dutifulness that was borderline compulsive, like administrative zealotry—when she realized she had a string of messages from Ward.

It’s not out of the question Mer if he says he knows then he knows

We don’t need anyone looking into these allegations

If he publishes we both go to prison

No offense but I will absolutely turn on you Mer

Fuck they’re going to subpoena our messages

You’re going to look so guilty

I look bad obviously but whatever happens to me will be nothing compared to you

There’s no legal precedent for this holy fuck it’s going to be everywhere

Tyche will let you burn for sure

The feds will make an example of you

They’ll charge you for way more than fraud

I could still get a cushy white collar prison situation out of this but you

There is truly no way out of this for you unless you get him to pull the article

Answer the phone Meredith

Holy shit Mer you have to do something you can’t just say you have it handled

YOU DO NOT HAVE IT HANDLED WE ARE FUCKED

This, Meredith had thought upon waking, was exactly the kind of masculine hysteria she did not have time for. She proceeded to take Ward’s call and explain to him in very clear, small words that he was to stop acting like an idiot and keep his shit together. Then, in a moment of extremely ill-advised panic, she had the brief, critically depressing thought that she wished she could have called her father.

Which probably made it sound like Meredith was sad about his death. She didn’t think sadness was the right word. She had always wondered, after the severe impairment to her entire personality that had been the loss of her mother, if she would even register the splintering off of whatever her father was to her. She felt sure it would be simple, a little breath of relief maybe, perhaps a twinge of loss here and there at the man she had always wanted him to be, which he never was. In the past, when she had had problems with the company or needed help attracting investors or legitimizing her ideas, she’d made the mistake of saying things to her father like “what should I do” that had routinely proven counterproductive.

The last time Meredith had asked the great Thayer Wren for advice had been a real low point, possibly the dictionary definition of low point, almost exactly five years ago. Meredith had already been on the path to disaster by then, not that she clocked it at the time. Mostly she was concerned that accepting a deal with her father’s nemesis might force her research in an unsavory direction, while rejecting it would mean watching her path to maximum life achievement go up in smoke. That her relationship with her father had been irreparably damaged the moment she’d agreed to meet with Merritt Foster—or that Lou had beaten her to the punch and sold her start-up to Tyche the year before—were personal matters, completely tangential, or so Meredith told herself all the time.

“I just worry,” Meredith began, “that what Foster sees in Chirp is less about helping people than it is about—”

“Have you heard from your sister lately?” said Thayer, picking at a plate of hummus. Meredith had chosen the place, which was already a terrible sign. Thayer was incredibly particular, and already in a bad mood because it was one of those restaurants where you had to order from a menu that was just an enormous board behind the counter, which meant you were under intense pressure to pick your meal with the knowledge that at least a dozen people were waiting behind you. Meredith had thought a sun-drenched patio sounded nice, but Thayer, mostly in shape for his age but with a tendency to run hot, was dabbing irritably at his forehead with a napkin, visibly wishing he’d stayed home.

“No,” said Meredith stubbornly, although she had looked at Eilidh’s social media the night before, which was easier than actually speaking to Eilidh. The risk of a conversation was nearly always too much for Meredith. “The thing is,” she continued, “I always knew there was going to be a tradeoff, you know, in terms of monetizing the product—”

“You get in bed with Tyche, you’re never getting out,” her father muttered gruffly. “They will own you. They’ll buy you, replace you with someone more seasoned who’ll do exactly what they’re told, and then you’ll do something else, Meredith, because that’s how Foster does business. Fucking guy,” Thayer added in an undertone before concluding, “Cutting that shithead loose was the luckiest thing that ever happened to Wrenfare.” Which was, as the kids say, a blatant lie.

“So I should turn down the deal?” asked Meredith helplessly.

“Kip Hughes is an egotistical shit-for-brains who hates to lose. He’ll outbid anyone else,” said Thayer with the apathetic flap of one hand. “He’s probably made sure everyone in the Valley knows you’re Tyche’s. They won’t touch you now.”

“But—”

“The problem with you,” Thayer snapped, “is that you think you’re smarter than everyone else. You think you know what you’re doing, you always have. But they’re not going to let you in, Meredith, not really, and they’re certainly not letting you run the show, because nobody in this industry is going to take you seriously. I told you,” Thayer said with an edge of warning, “get a degree, get some actual experience under your belt, then you can work for Wrenfare—”

“But you didn’t get a degree.” Meredith could feel her cheeks flaming.

“I also starved for a long time, Meredith. I groveled. I laughed at the shit jokes and I kissed the asses I needed to kiss for long enough that they trusted me—” (And here, what Thayer could not voice aloud: And I had Merritt Foster, who had the Harvard degree I couldn’t get .)

“But why couldn’t I have developed Chirp for Wrenfare?” Meredith demanded, failing as she usually did to hear subtext where it didn’t pertain to her personal logic. “You told me my entire life that if I wanted to succeed, then I had to do the work, so I did.”

“Exactly,” said Thayer. “Do the work— all of the work. Which means learning to coexist with other people, Meredith, because nobody in this industry ever works without a team. It also means learning when it’s worth holding your ground and when it’s wiser to play the long game—to keep your head down.”

“Why should I keep my head down?” Meredith could tell her voice was rising. A few people had already glanced her way, and Thayer was angling himself away from her, as if they barely knew each other. As if he needed plausible deniability, so that if anyone asked if this was his daughter, he could act like he hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. “You want me to be softer, be less, just so a bunch of old men don’t get their feelings hurt?”

“People who lead this industry are worth learning from,” Thayer said with a warning glare, getting as defensive as he always got when she suggested that his contemporaries were past their usefulness. “Everyone in this world gets where they are because someone else takes a shot on them. I got where I did because I wasn’t a threat to the people who were willing to help me—and for that, it’s my name on the company. It’s me in the driver’s seat.”

“Okay, so which part about me do you think they find so terrifying?” pressed Meredith, who could feel herself getting emotional now. “My intellect? My ideas? My vagina?”

“Don’t be crass,” muttered Thayer with revulsion.

“Is it the fact that the average Silicon Valley CEO genuinely thinks I might be in league with ‘the Chinese’?” snapped Meredith.

“Let me ask you something,” Thayer said, levying a piece of pita in her direction like he’d just unsheathed a sword. “What did you say when Kip told you?”

“Told me what?” said Meredith with only the slightest stumble, in lieu of saying she had yet to speak personally to Kip Hughes, the founder of Tyche, who had been a thorn in Thayer’s side for as long as Meredith could remember. Which Lou had also known when she signed with Tyche, by the way. But as usual, Meredith shoved all thoughts of Lou aside.

“When he gave you the propaganda, the red pill speech. You know—‘this idea of yours could change the world, you just have to think bigger.’” Thayer did an absurd impression of Kip, as if the CEO who’d shaped magitech commerce from the ground up was a child and not a grown man no less than ten years Thayer’s junior. “I’m guessing he used the words ‘revolutionary’ and ‘disruption’ in there somewhere,” Thayer added with an air of spiteful mockery.

Actually, it had been Kip’s adviser—the same adviser who’d once been Thayer’s. A product this revolutionary would be the disruption Big Pharma has needed for decades, had been Merritt Foster’s exact words. You just have to see that your market goes beyond the simple delivery of SSRIs. What you have is a product that could change the way every human being moves through the world, and Tyche could help you do it.

Oh, Meredith had breathed, and Cass, sitting behind Foster in the conference room, just to the left of the presentation screen, had smiled at her.

“I… said I’d think about it,” said Meredith.

Thayer gave her a fleeting look; the kind that reminded Meredith how infrequently he actually looked at her. Normally it was like there was something in her that he couldn’t stand to see—something that jumped out and tied the two of them together. Like he looked at her and saw something weighing him down, some shadow he couldn’t shake.

She knew then that he wasn’t going to help her. He was going to ridicule her, and he was going to do it in a way that sounded like caution, even though it felt like criticism. He was going to call it love, even though it was only ever disappointment.

“It’s a strong offer,” said Meredith to her hands. “I really thought you’d be proud.”

Later, she would wish she hadn’t said it.

“If I thought your product was worth anywhere near as much as Tyche was offering,” her father told her without even a moment’s hesitation, “I would have outbid them by now.”

Meredith shook herself free of the memory and thought, in a very cold, firm internal voice, he’s dead now. Lots of incredible people had shitty fathers. Lots of people worked hard because they had something to prove. Really, she ought to thank him. She could put his body in the ground and step over it, outpace him, use his legacy and the memory of his disappointment to raise herself back up.

She shouldn’t have had the thought What would my father do, because the answer was that her father would never have been in this predicament. Her father wouldn’t have been swayed by someone telling him he’d done something brilliant, patting him on the head and practically leading him by the hand. He wouldn’t have been so desperate to have the resources, the money, the reach. He wouldn’t have cheated, and if he knew that Meredith had, he would cut her off from everything. His estimation. His legacy. Whatever he claimed to be his love.

His last will and testament. She shivered a little, wondering what would have driven Thayer Wren to draw up a new will with a new attorney a month ago; whether such a thought somehow concurred with a larger shift in the zeitgeist, riding the same invisible current that had driven Jamie to suspect her of flying too close to the sun. How long had everyone been mobilizing against her? She felt like the butt of the joke; that her months—years—spent waiting for the shoe to drop were not only earned, but worsened by retrospect. She’d done nothing but scour the sky and still she’d failed to see it falling. Was it because success was never a real outcome—had that always been doom in her future, the thing she’d misread as brightness the whole time?

The glass cliff, thought Meredith, searching around for some justifiable anger. It meant the phenomenon of women being awarded captaincy over men only when a company is in trouble, when leadership is more likely to fail. It meant letting a woman win the battle only when she was sure to lose the war. Philosophically, Meredith could intellectualize the inequity of this, falling back on the reliability of her sociological, systemic rage—the one where she’d been doomed from the start by the narrative, by the institution, by a deep, patriarchal flaw.

As always, though, her darker thoughts were quick to whisper Not you, though, dummy! You’ve deserved this all along.

Inevitably, Meredith thought of Lou again; of what a typical Tuesday might look like in Lou’s current life. Meredith had always imagined it would go something like this:

7:00 AM : Awaken sweetly beside long-term partner, perhaps to morning cunnilingus.

8:00 AM : Accept an award.

9:00 AM : Throw the first pitch for the season opener at Tyche Stadium.

10:00 AM : Cure cancer, uninvent childhood hunger.

11:00 AM : Throw darts at an effigy of Meredith.

12:00 PM : More cunnilingus.

1:00 PM : Board meeting for whatever magitech venture Lou was pursuing lately (curing cancer being more of a philanthropic hobby).

2:00 PM : Burn aforementioned effigy of Meredith.

3:00 PM : Receive secret document detailing Meredith’s many professional failures; laugh maniacally.

4:00 PM : Engage sudden craving for complex souffle; bake perfectly.

5:00 PM : Nap.

6:00 PM : Wake up.

6:15 PM : Contemplate Meredith’s destruction.

6:19 PM : Suddenly recall that Meredith did not need any help destroying herself, on account of being a complete and total hack.

6:30 PM : Forget about Meredith completely, attend Posh Gala with Handsome Celebrity.

And so on. Leave it to Meredith to not know baseball season was well underway.

In any case, before Meredith could linger too long down that particular spiral, Ward called again, freaking out about the investors this time— They must have heard by now, they’re asking for more clarification on our testing parameters, nobody would ask for this unless they really knew—THEY KNOW, MEREDITH, THEY KNOW —and then, around ten that morning, her phone buzzed with a message.

Coffee? asked Jamie Ammar.

Meredith stared at his name on her screen, wondering why she wasn’t surprised. Shouldn’t she be? She thought about Cass, who was working upstairs from her bed. Their bed. He’d asked her how yesterday’s spontaneous drive had gone and she said fine, she’d tried to talk Jamie out of publishing the article and he’d refused, so now it was over.

“Tyche will bury it if it’s any legitimate threat,” Cass had said with a shrug, because he didn’t understand that actually, Thayer was right; that Tyche would use this as an excuse to toss Meredith aside, to bury her under the weight of their misdeeds because everyone was just waiting for her to fail. There was no love for her in this industry. If Jamie published an article proving Chirp to be an insidious con, in all likelihood, Tyche still profited. Jamie couldn’t take them down without taking Meredith down harder, ending her career, making her the sacrificial lamb, the obvious agent for Tyche’s financial crimes while Kip Hughes and Merritt Foster settled easily out of court. While they kept selling the thing she’d spent decades trying to make, only to warp it beyond recognition the moment her check had cleared. Possibly long before that.

Because she’d taken the money. Her hands were filthy, with no way to walk that reality back. She knew who she’d gotten in bed with. No one had said anything when Tyche was accused of tracking users’ data. Nothing had changed when people criticized the conditions of Tyche’s factories, their history of labor abuse, the thousands of workers who were undertrained and injured on the job. People still bought their products, still used their services. The only difference was that now everyone knew it was bad, Meredith included, so everything she said yes to was just another bite from the poisonous tree.

All of which Thayer had pointed out to Meredith. Not in the context of her own ethical responsibility (irrelevant) but to point out the reality that despite Foster’s multibillion-dollar offer—despite Meredith’s ability to stand (attempts to stand) on her own merit—she still had not actually won. Because it was Meredith that Tyche would happily slaughter if it meant keeping her product—and their means of monetizing it—alive.

Thayer had known it because for all intents and purposes, he was Kip Hughes—he’d been the man at the top all his life, which Meredith could never be.

Thayer was right about her all along. And now Wrenfare, the thing she’d tried so hard to be good enough for, would transfer breezily to someone else.

Not that it mattered at the moment. Not that this feeling was grief, or that grief was merited under any circumstances. Not that the ache in her chest was any reasonable form of loss.

Meredith stared down at her screen, pondering what to say to the man who was first and foremost a traitor before he could be considered her ex.

What changed your mind? asked Meredith.

I didn’t change my mind , said Jamie. What made you think I’d changed my mind?

You mean you’re still publishing the article?

Yes

Even after hearing everything I told you yesterday?

Especially after that, yes

You seriously think I’m okay with you doing this?

No, I don’t imagine you’re ok with any of it. Nor , he added pointedly, am I ok with you trying to brainwash me, just so we’re clear

Right, this hasn’t been mentioned yet, but in case it’s crossing your mind that Meredith, who can change the brain chemistry of her test patients magically, might also be willing to alter the mind of her investigative journalist ex-boyfriend who may or may not be about to destroy her, the answer is yes, she did try that. Unfortunately (for Meredith), the reason she and Jamie Ammar broke up in the first place has a lot to do with how far Meredith will go to keep herself on top.

Meredith rolled her eyes. If you think I’m trying to brainwash you, why would you want to have coffee with me? And why would I want to see you again when you clearly have every intention to ruin my life?

No logical reason I can think of , replied Jamie, but when has that ever stopped us?

Fair enough, thought Meredith with a sigh. She thought again about Cass, about the glasses he wore when he used his computer, about how he looked shirtless, about how he promised her in very soothing tones that everything would be all right despite the fact that no, it wouldn’t, because her father was dead and nothing would ever be right again.

Then she hated herself no more or less than usual when she typed back, Fuck you, I’ll be there in five.