Page 6 of Gifted & Talented

Her phone buzzed again in her hand. Exhaling sharply, Meredith silenced it with a swipe across the screen, grateful for the temporary break in concentration.

“How’s Sarah?” she said, in a tone of marked indifference delivered so successfully she almost wanted to cheer until she heard his answer.

“Fine,” said Jamie. “She just gave birth a few weeks ago.”

Something in Meredith’s chest withered and died, though her voice came out harsher, meaner. So much for indifference. “That’s how you announce that you have a baby? ‘She gave birth,’ no mention of yourchild,or I don’t know, your utter fucking joy? God, domesticity clearly suits you,” Meredith snarled.

Jamie looked at her for a long, long time.

Then he gave the tiniest shake of his head. “As far as I know, it suits Sarah and her husband just fine.”

“You—” Meredith blinked and her fucking stye distracted her for a second. She blinked several times, trying to clear her vision. “You didn’t marry Sarah?” she managed, which even under these circumstances was obviously lame as hell.

But Jamie seemed to know there was no point traveling any further down that particular path.

“You and I both know what you can do, Meredith.” He’d collected himself, which was a shame. She would have liked to hear something, whateverthere was to hear about why he hadn’t married the woman he’d decided all those years ago he couldn’t live without. “No other journalist had any reason to investigate why your clinical results and the results of your paid users don’t match up. But I do.” He gave her a significant look, summoning before the court a wordless exhibition of their years together.

Well.Year,with some spare change for irresponsible behavior.

Meredith felt her mouth tighten. “What is it you think I did?” She wondered if he’d say it aloud. He’d never been able to before. Not even when they were fighting. Not even when his doubt in her had been heaviest, and most profound.

“I know you’re lying,” said Jamie, which was such blatant hedging that Meredith felt rickety, unsteady. “Early product testing for Chirp was through the roof. Every clinical patient is changed, substantially, as if their entire personality has been rewritten. But no results since have shown any evidence ofhappiness,Meredith.”

“There’s no way you could prove that.” Her mind raced with rationalities. The identities of those trial patients weren’t public. Even so, all of this was anecdotal.

“I’m an investigative journalist, Meredith. This is literally what I do.”

“How could you even know who was a patient in the trials?”

“Investigative journalism,” Jamie coolly repeated, which Meredith hotly ignored.

“Unless you broke into our facilities or—”

She stopped. Something occurred to her belatedly. Somewhere in the cogs of the tireless, calculating machine that Meredith Wren called a deductive process, a red flag quietly rose, no less unavoidable than the strike of a match.

She lunged.

It was unclear what Jamie had expected. It was less appropriate to call his reaction a dodge than it was a flinch, and whether there was to be any sort of reciprocal reaction or pendulum defense was initially unreadable. Meredith, for her part, scrabbled unsuccessfully to pry apart his shirt, an undercooked course of action that did not play out as planned.

“Jesus, Meredith,what—”

“I’m checking for a wire,” she said calmly, struggling to free the second button after the first, then the third, and so on sequentially, with Jamie toostunned to physically remove her, despite the difficulty she was having with his clothing. “Since I clearly can’t trust you anymore.”

By the time Jamie regained the presence of mind to lift her hands from his garment, Meredith had gotten all the way to the top of his trousers, at that point unable to say with certainty that the dark trail of hair leading to his zipper was unchanged from what lived on in her imagination. In the shadows of the fractionally lit conference room, it was unclear if there were hints of silver there or any other indicators of the passage of time. Only that he had remained diligent with his core.

There was, however, no wire. They both seemed to realize in the same instance the strangeness of the moment and briefly locked eyes, until Meredith, clinging to the reserves of her dignity, opted to say aloud, “I’m just now realizing that I don’t know how wires work. You could have planted a mic anywhere.”

Her eyes narrowed before dropping to his trousers.

“Are you insane?” Jamie asked her seriously, with no attempts to resolve his current state of half dress. “I know this is a touchy subject, but sincerely, and with all due respect, are you in your right mind?”

“That,” Meredith snapped, “is a ridiculous thing to say.”

Jamie glanced crossly down at her. “Now that we both agree I’m not some kind of gumshoe narc, maybe I should be the one determining what is or isn’t ridiculous.”

“You’rethe one who’s threatening me,” she reminded him with a sudden, blistering recollection of the stakes. “How am I supposed to know how low you’re willing to go?”

“You think whatI’mdoing is low?” Jamie stared at her, seemingly astounded in a way he had not been moments before. “Meredith, I owe you nothing. The fact that I’m warning you at all is purely a matter of personal ethics. I know what you’re doing,” he said with another meaningful glance, or a sliver of one she knew to be unavoidably puncturing, “and I know what Tyche is monetizing, and if you think I’m going to stand by and let you defraud not only your investors butevery single human alive—”

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