Page 114 of Gifted & Talented

This was when he saw her. Her last moments, her sense of entitlement to love, her certainty that she deserved it even when it was stolen. Yves reached for a bit of chocolate in his pocket, carefully selecting a small square before returning to the conversation.

“Oh, Mouse, I can’t marry you,” he said, popping the medicine in his mouth. “Not because I don’t love you,” he added, though that love had taken on a very different form, the kind that needed periodic windows of distance, or that could only be felt from afar, or perhaps exclusively in retrospect. “Your family is riddled with debt and your hobbies err slightly hypocritical, and I am beginning to suspect you enjoy thinking of me as a simpleton.” It saddenedhim to say those things aloud. “May I focus on your erotic regions now?” Yves asked optimistically.

“Yes, fine.” Philippa lay back again, then sat up, abruptly changing her mind. “Wait, you never answered the question. Why did you come here?”

The answer: because Yves was in love with Arthur and wanted to get away from Philippa, though there seemed no productive outcome to saying so out loud.

“Arthur needs us,” said Yves. “You know how difficult his love for his father has been. He has countless feelings and nowhere to put them.”

“Fine,” said Philippa in a voice that was too compliant, so Yves decided she had likely pieced together some kind of sinister plan. But then he remembered the rest of his time with her would be limited, and so he did his best to pleasure her as expertly as he knew how, and when he noticed that she was gone the next day, he realized that he would miss her.

Although not, per se, right now.

64

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 fromher 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 exactlythat. “But my father never made an offer on Chirp. Or anything related to Birdsong.”

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