Page 42 of Gifted & Talented

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 thataccepting 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,thenyou 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 ChirpforWrenfare?” 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—allof 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, beless,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.

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