Chapter Seven
Jamie
Aaron’s office was on the twenty-eighth floor of one of the most prestigious new high rises in San Francisco. He must have paid more than Scintilla was worth to purchase a place like this. It screamed wealth and competence.
I straightened my tie and stepped into the board room. One dozen faces, including Aaron’s, glanced up at me.
Grinning, I said, “Sorry if I’m a couple of minutes late. Still getting used to the renowned Bay Area traffic.”
They all chuckled, and Aaron said, “No, you’re right on time. We were early—seems like all these developers are extremely eager to get to work.”
“Excellent,” I said, “then let’s begin.”
Aaron held a seat out for me at the end of the table next to him, so I sat down, putting my briefcase on the table in front of me. I pulled out a pile of paperwork and held it in my hands. “If you could all just take one and pass it down, just like in school.”
Immediately the stacks were passed around, and I noted, with satisfaction, the confused looks on a lot of the developers’ faces.
“Uh, Mr. Tolbert, my booklet is empty.”
The woman next to the speaker said, “Mine is, too.”
I nodded. “I did that on purpose. Don’t think I’ve come unprepared, because I haven’t. Aaron and I have brainstormed a lot of facets of this app we want to develop, but if you want us to hire you, we want to see some of your work. Brainstorm with you, work alongside you as much as possible. This is a team venture.”
Several of them nodded and took pens out of briefcases and handbags.
“So before you can do your part, I’ll do mine. Aaron, is the presentation all set up?”
He nodded and clicked a remote. The wall at the back of the room lit up. I didn’t have a scripted presentation, and it wasn’t going to be a long one. Just five or so slides, and then we’d let them get to work. Those who had the best ideas, we’d be hiring. If we wanted, we could hire them all, but they didn’t know that yet.
The first slide came up, with a stock photo of a couple staring adoringly into each other’s eyes. Before I met Liz, such an image might have made me faintly sick, because the way the guy looked at the girl reminded me a lot of how I’d looked at Allison.
“So, we’ve got all these dating apps, right?” I said. “OkCupid, Tinder, and the Scintilla app that I developed and recently sold back to my brother. But that’s not where a relationship stops, is it? Once you meet someone, there’s a long way to go. And frankly, how many of us have wasted months or even years on the wrong person?”
A couple of people raised their hands uncertainly, and I laughed, looking at the rest of the room. “Just two of you?”
Chuckling, everyone else raised their hands.
“Exactly. What if we could have an app that saves people the trouble? Saves them those precious years?”
Every single face in the room looked riveted, and I could see even a few greedy gleams in their eyes. They were digging this—and I knew without a doubt that they wanted in. That was the Tolbert magic at work again. A brilliant idea, taken to the highest level possible.
“Aaron and I wanted to open this up to ideas. We want to go beyond basic personality tests, and far beyond those quizzes you’ll find in Cosmo and Glamour.”
The next slide had a bullet point listing magazine quizzes, personality quizzes, with an ellipsis to indicate there was more out there.
“There’s so much to be done,” I said, “although our initial idea is strong. How might we help people really learn whether the person they’re dating is ‘the one’?”
They all got quiet. A woman at the far end of the table said, “Could you give us an example?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Things like, ‘Does your heart beat a little faster when you happen upon them by chance?’ or ‘The smile you get when you think of the last time they smiled.’ How about compatibility? Starting with a really strong friendship?” With a sinking feeling in my gut, I realized that all of those criteria reminded me of Allison. And now that she was in my head, she wasn’t getting out again.
I thought I’d made my peace with my crush becoming my sister-in-law, but right now the heartbreak was closing in on me once more.
A few people gave some ideas, and I nodded, but it was like I wasn’t really in the room anymore. I was walking at Allison’s side when we grabbed hot dogs from the vendor outside the Scintilla building. She’d been wearing one of her ill-fitting pantsuits, and her hair was in a frizzy ponytail, and I hadn’t cared one bit. It was her intelligence, her laugh, her personality that had shone through.
“Yeah,” I said, automatically. “And…”
And I choked. I couldn’t continue the sentence, because I kept seeing Allison’s eyes, shining with mirth at one of my dumb jokes.
“And,” Aaron said, “that’s what we want you for. Let’s help each other figure out how to quantify something as subjective and emotional as ‘the one.’”
The developers nodded. Aaron and I stood up, and they all did as well, coming over to shake our hands, introduce themselves again, share sparks of inspiration they’d just had. Everyone was excited and eager to get started.
This was going to be awesome, but I had to get out of here. “Sorry, everyone, I have to take off.”
Aaron gave me a strange look because this hadn’t been part of the plan, but he clapped me on the back. “Sure, Jamie. See you tomorrow.”
“Sounds great.”
I grabbed my briefcase and rushed outside. The morning was still foggy and gray, and the cool air helped cool my overheated neck and face. I’d let myself get in too deep with Allison. That was all in the past now, but I couldn’t help feeling that it had something to show me about my future. I mean, in politics, social justice, everything, all we had to do was look to history to help us understand the future.
I was looking into my history, and it told me one thing: don’t give up too much of your heart. Don’t let yourself get too involved, too smitten. Because it can easily be yanked away without any warning.
Maybe things were going too far, too fast, with Liz. Maybe we should just be friends.