One by One
* * *
Downstairs the rooms are quiet but considerably warmer, and there’s a pile of what I imagine must be yesterday’s croissants keeping warm by the woodburner in the lobby, and two big thermos flasks sitting on the hearth.
I pick up a croissant and go through to the living room to warm my hands at the fire while I eat it. I assume I am alone. But then something catches my eye and I turn to see Elliot, seated in an armchair, bent over his laptop. The sight surprises me for two reasons—one, his laptop is on and seems to be plugged in. And two, Elliot almost never comes out of his room except for meals. In fact, when I was working at Snoop, he didn’t even leave his office for those. He got whoever was doing work experience to bring him takeout—the same thing every day, black coffee and three Pret cheese-and-bacon croissants. It must have been very inconvenient when they stopped serving croissants all day and moved them to the breakfast menu. I find myself wondering what he did. Changed his lunch? Somehow I can’t imagine that. Maybe he started sending the work experience person out at 10:00 a.m.
I don’t normally talk to Elliot. He is very hard to make conversation with, though perhaps that is not my fault. Eva once told me that he divides women into ones he would like to sleep with and ones who are not of interest to him. I am definitely in the latter category. But now I pluck up my courage.
“Hi, Elliot.”
“Hello, Liz.” He says it flatly, but I know him well enough to know that’s not a measure of his enthusiasm. He greets everyone like that, even Topher, who is probably his favorite human being out of anyone.
“How come your laptop is working?”
“I always carry a battery pack.” He holds it up, a chunky thing the size of a brick that is plugged into the power port of his computer. Of course. How like Elliot to leave nothing to chance.
“But you’ve got no internet, right?”
“No,” he agrees. “But I don’t need it for coding.”
“What are you working on?”
“The geosnoop update.” His normally pale face flushes with excitement a little bit, and he launches off into a long explanation I don’t completely follow about geotracking, ad partners, information storage, GDPR, and the technical challenges of making all those elements work with the law and the existing Snoop interface. I nod along, feigning more interest than I really feel. The only thing I really care about is the fact that he used this technology to find Eva. Somehow that seems unbearably poignant—that her own app may be what leads search and rescue to her body.
“I see,” I say at last, as Elliot grinds to a halt. “It sounds very… exciting.” I try to make my voice sound convincing, but Elliot doesn’t really seem to care. It’s not like he ever shows much expression of his own feelings.
“Now if you don’t mind, I need to work,” he says abruptly, with the directness that is so disconcerting.
“Sorry,” I say. “I thought maybe you came down to chat.”
“I came down because it’s too cold to type in my room,” he says, and then he puts his headphones on, and his fingers begin to clatter across the keyboard once more.
I should be offended. I feel like I ought to be. But I’m not. He may be direct to the point of rudeness, but right now, there is something reassuring about that. With Elliot, there are no secret codes to unravel, no hidden meanings, no weight of expectation. If he wants you to know something, he says it. If he wants something to happen, he tells you. Just at the moment, there is something comforting about it, in contrast to the smoke-and-mirror world of Topher and Eva, where you never know quite where you stand. Sometimes, back in the early days at Snoop, they would remind me of my parents—the way it would all be sweetness and light in front of visitors, and then screaming and threats when the company had left. At least when Elliot says, “Have you got a problem with that?” you know he genuinely wants an answer.
When my father said it, there was only one answer you were allowed to give: No, Daddy. And then get out of the way as fast as possible, before the blow landed.
I’m nibbling on the edge of the croissant, staring into the flames of the woodburner, when a noise behind me makes me jump. The croissant falls to the floor in a shower of crumbs. I pick it up. Then I turn to see Rik and Miranda coming into the room. Rik looks like he hasn’t slept.
“How are you?” he says to me abruptly, as he sits beside me. I’m taken aback, not sure what to answer. It’s the perfect illustration of the difference between Rik and Elliot. If Elliot were asking I would know what he meant—only Elliot would likely never ask, because he would understand the impossibility of the question. But when Rik asks, it becomes a puzzle to decode. What does he mean? Does he want to know how I feel about Eva’s death? How can I sum that up in a simple answer? Or is he just asking in the meaningless way that people do, only wanting the answer fine?
“I’m… I’m okay,” I say cautiously. “Considering.”
“Really?” Rik looks at me, surprised. “You’re a bigger person than me.” He glances across at Elliot and then lowers his voice, though Elliot is still wearing his big noise-canceling headphones, and I doubt he can hear a thing. “Having that kind of money dangled under your nose and then snatched away…”
Suddenly the real meaning of his question is clear. He wants to talk about Topher. About what this shift in power means for the buyout.
“I… I hadn’t really thought about it,” I say, and it’s the truth… in a way. I would be lying if I claimed I hadn’t wondered what would happen now that Topher controls the company. But somehow the money never felt that real to me. I never felt I had earned it. It doesn’t feel like I had anything taken away—just like I had a strange dream, and then woke up to reality. Only, this—the avalanche, Eva’s death, this doesn’t feel like reality either. More like waking from a dream to find yourself in an equally surreal nightmare.
“But hadn’t you made plans? Banked on the money?”
“Not really,” I say, slowly. “To be honest, I hadn’t really come to terms with the idea that it was going to happen anyway.”
“Jesus.” Rik says. He looks annoyed. I think I’ve said the wrong thing, but I don’t know how. A sense of panic sets in. It is the same sense I always got with my father. That I would do or say the wrong thing. That he would take it out on my mother. “Could you cut the Mother Teresa act, Liz? We’ve lost everything. Don’t you get that?”
“W-we haven’t lost everything though, surely? I mean, we’ve still got the shares.”
“The shares!” Rik gives a short, barking laugh. “Liz, did you listen to the P and L figures I gave out yesterday? We’ll be lucky if Snoop makes it to the year-end at the rate Topher’s going, and without Eva to reassure investors, that’s only going to get worse.”
“But, the update,” I say, although I know I am scrabbling for reassurance now. “Elliot’s geosnooping thing—isn’t the whole point of that to make Snoop more profitable?”
“From a revenue point of view, we’ve already got that information, we’ve had it since the permissions changed last year. How Elliot integrates it into the app may make a difference to the user experience, but user satisfaction has never been our problem, the issue has always been monetizing that. From an investor perspective, rolling out the geosnoop update won’t make a difference—all the added value is already there. And anyway”—he glances over his shoulder at Elliot, who is still typing away—“I’ve got concerns about that update. I don’t think people realize how much information Snoop is gathering on them. I think when this update makes the level of tracking visible, we might have a backlash on our hands.”