Page 69 of Gifted & Talented

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Meredith rose early to prepare for a phone call with the chairman of her father’s board. Another Edward, as it were. She’d heard nothing further from Ward, who’d evidently cut ties with her after lawyering up, perhaps having been advised by then to say nothing.

She wondered how much of their partnership Ward was willing to deny. Would he, for example, say in a deposition, under oath, that he had tried to pick up Meredith in a bar when she was twenty, and that he had only forgone his lascivious intent when he realized why she was there, which was to speak specifically to him?

“I have this idea,” said Meredith, poor idiot baby, future asshole, at the time only an asshole in training. “I was wasting my time at Harvard and I want to commit to this thing, for real. I just need someone more experienced in magitech—in neuromancy, specifically.”

Ward’s parents had wanted him to be a doctor. Shortly after declaring neurology as a specialty, he had dropped out of his med school residency, not by choice. Clinical depression simply wins when it wins.

Ward, of course, was a self-saboteur of the highest order. He pivoted to start-ups because that sort of fast-paced world suits a person who doesn’t care to think long-term; who likes to sweat and bleed for a handful of violently sleepless months and then, like waking from a dream, move on. He was the product of the technomancy age by circumstance, by virtue of his generation, and the presence of a particularly gruesome computer game about surviving the high seas (much was made at the time of scurvy, and indeed Meredith never saw Ward without an orange in his lunch). He briefly went to jail for assaulting his former business partner, drunk one night and rudderless.

Coincidentally, a week before their encounter in the bar, Meredith had taken a meeting with one of her father’s VCs to ask for advice—she had emailed from her father’s account, CCing herself, hoping he wouldn’t notice—and the VC had told her that nobody wanted an untested college dropout without some assurance of success.

“So then what do I need?” asked Meredith, young, youngyoungyoung, twin spots of acne on her cheeks.

“Nobody in their right mind would agree to this,” said the VC, “so I guess what you need is someone desperate.”

So she met up with Ward in that bar, got him to turn it all around, and then eventually Merritt Foster had come for her, and Ward had ridden with her on the unicorn she made sure they were. But she supposed she couldn’t blame Ward now for his choice to turn on her. She’d known what she was doing when she’d chosen the partner she chose. She called it a feature instead of a bug when it had suited her at the time, but like depression, desperation was what it was.

She was sitting in her father’s office when the phone number for Edward Roque, the chairman of the board at Wrenfare Magitech, appeared on her watch screen. She tapped her earbud, answering. “Good morning, Ed.”

“Meredith.” Edward Roque was even older than her father. She wondered if that was crossing his mind. “What an unfortunate day.”

“If you don’t mind, Ed, I’d like to keep it brief,” said Meredith.

“Of course.”

“So, as you know, my father bequeathed his ownership shares to me.”

“Yes.”

“Meaning, as I’m sure you’re aware, that I’m able to appoint myself Wrenfare’s next CEO.”

“Meredith—” Ed paused. “I do want to warn you. Operationally, things are in a bit of disarray. I do think it’s very likely that our only profitable option will be to sell.”

Meredith drummed her nails on her father’s desk.

“Candidly, we have been trying for the last few years to get Thayer to consider the offers we have on the table,” Ed continued. “We understood, of course, Thayer’s personal opposition to Kip Hughes—”

“Personal?” Meredith echoed.

“Ah.” Ed’s sigh sounded like a prelude to a long and tiresome story. “Thayer never did get over Merritt’s betrayal, or Kip’s subsequent investment in Birdsong,” he explained. “He felt the whole thing was in poor taste.”

Meredith thought back to Thayer’s many, many lectures about exactly that. “But my father never made an offer on Chirp. Or anything related to Birdsong.”

“Well, he couldn’t, Meredith. Tyche simply had more money. We’ve been on a backslide for the last decade, if not more. Thayer could never have matched Kip’s offer.”

A doozy of a sudden revelation. Privately, Meredith felt a soaring sense that maybe, just maybe, her father had never actually intended to undermine her. Maybe Thayer had always believed Meredith was gifted—maybe he had known she was capable of greatness after all, and he had been saddened that she’d torn herself away from him, choosing instead to stand with a man he considered a rival.

“Unfortunately, I think it was all too clear that Merritt knew what he was doing when he used Kip Hughes to buy Thayer Wren’s daughter out from under him,” Ed continued, shattering Meredith’s burgeoning internal aria of relief. “Much of the board admires what Kip has done for Tyche, but Thayer knew—and I agreed—that Merritt would grind the Wren name into the dust at the first chance he got, purely out of some juvenile misguided spite. He did it with you, and would clearly do it again with Wrenfare.”

The result of this insane decentering of Meredith’s talent as any meaningful piece in the ongoing Merritt-Thayer enmity was a cool, insidious flood of disappointment. “That’s what my father thought? That his former partner just wanted the Wren name however he could get it?”

“I can’t say all was friendly between them,” Ed said.

“But Tyche didn’t buy me . They invested in Chirp.” God, Meredith thought, I’m an idiot. I put my whole worth on this thing, this one project, this one dream, I let first one man and then the other give me meaning. But it was a dick-measuring contest all along.

“Well, of course,” said Ed pleasantly. “I’m just expressing that I don’t believe a deal with Tyche was ever really on the table for your father. However, there are plenty of investors who’d likely pay a premium—for example, a very reputable technomancy company based in Beijing, not to mention a group of highly savvy investors from Saudi Arabia—”

“Can we talk shop after my father’s ashes are cold?” asked Meredith.

“Oh, Meredith, absolutely. I just—” Ed hesitated. “Meredith. I’ve known you since you were a little girl. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to bring this up. But.”

Meredith’s organs twisted slightly.

“There is a bit of a rumble about Chirp going around. And there is a possibility that if things become litigiously difficult, the board may be forced to call for a vote.”

To remove her, he meant. They didn’t want mess and she was mess. Thayer had always emphasized that no one liked her, that no one would give her the benefit of the doubt if she ever performed less than spectacularly, and she had treated that like a battle cry, a personal demand for perfection, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even a warning. Thayer wasn’t different! He was one of them —one of the doubters, the haters. There was no chance he thought the board would stick by her, whether it was Thayer’s dying wish or not. Thayer must have known she’d go down with a flaming pile of shit in each hand. How better to destroy the daughter who betrayed you than to let the whole world watch her prove herself a snake? If the rivalry with Tyche had never been about Meredith, this decision must have been the opposite. It was Thayer flipping her off, telling her to reap what she sowed. To prove that the one thing she’d always wanted to be good enough for was impossible, because even when he gave it to her, she still couldn’t hold it for long.

She stared at her father’s artwork, the ballerina on the wall. The shadow of a man standing leeringly in the background. All her life her father had been preparing her for this—for the men who didn’t like her. For the men who wanted, even at the risk of their own profits, to see her fail. She hadn’t fallen in line and inevitably she would suffer for it, and hadn’t Thayer told her that himself? Was she really so surprised that the pettiest I told you so was worth the price of his own legacy when he had never changed his story, even once?

But then again, his legacy was finished. He was dead, but she was not. Fuck his legacy, fuck his aspirations, fuck the glory of the House of Wren that he had chosen to own alone rather than share with her. Eilidh could have destroyed the company just as well, just as soundly, but Thayer hadn’t wanted the blade to fall on the neck of his favorite.

So why shouldn’t Meredith be the one to burn it down?

“You’re saying you want a quick sale,” Meredith translated over the phone. “Not just quick. Immediate.”

Ed let out a breath of relief. “Well, within reason, of course.”

No. Fuck reason. She had a legal battle to fund.

Take the money, Jamie had said. Take the money and run.

Thanks, Dad, she thought with wrenching sincerity.

“Right. Well, I want to see all offers of sale by end of day,” said Meredith. Thayer had to have known what he’d done when he picked her over Eilidh. He chose the daughter who had never once bent the knee, and if that was purely to protect one child over the other, it didn’t matter. That failure was on him. Thank you, Dad, for raising me strong enough. Fuck you for making me that way. “Including best and final from Kip Hughes.”

Now Ed’s voice carried an edge of concern. “Meredith, there’s no need t—”

“See you at the funeral,” she said, and tapped her earbud to hang up the phone.