Page 4 of Of Literature and Lattes
That sentence wasn’t a question, but the woman’s sneer demanded an answer.
“So it seems.” Alyssa tried to bank her bitterness, which had crept in at interview number ten. While she knew it was off-putting and unlikely to land her a job, she found that her anger—at the company, at the lies, even at herself—kept her from crying, which was how she’d answered that line of questioning during interviews one, two, and three. Because it always came up.
During interview number four, she’d tried for honesty...
“Everything that happened is being unraveled, and it was horrible. But I do think my team’s algorithms worked. Through three testing rounds we matched perfectly the reconstructed data sets... I don’t know what went wrong, and if our work unwittingly harmed someone, my hope is they can be notified. Some customers... I can’t imagine their questions and concerns. It was big stuff we were looking toward, but it was always years ahead. People can be notified, and the worry can stop. It was all predictive, not diagnostic—”
“Stop!” the interviewer had shot back. “Stop justifying yourself. No one had anything! You were playing God, for profit, and you have no idea what that lie could do to someone, to whole families.” He escorted her out of his office within thirty seconds, and she stood throwing up in the parking lot within sixty.
The underlying questions in each interview had boiled down to a caustic mix ofHow could you be so stupid?andAre you really that greedy and cruel?One interviewer actually used those words, and Alyssa couldn’t blame him. They were the million-dollar questions. Or in XGC’s case—the 1.2-billion-dollar questions. Everyone in Silicon Valley wanted the answers, as did the federal agents working the case. And those questions were the reason why Alyssa, and everyone else involved, remained the subject of multiple investigations, gossip, and speculation—and unhirable until answers were found.
The questions haunted Alyssa in her quieter moments as well. She tossed and turned most nights, stomach on fire with the ulcers that simmered during her final months at XGC and flamed higher during the last six unemployed.
Looking back, she could see last fall more clearly now. Tag had taken XGC’s frenzy to a whole new level.
Always cavalier and charismatic, he showed signs of cracking. At the time she believed him—it was because they were close. Now she knew the truth...
We are at the end. All our hard work is paying off, and testing shows that we did it. We have rolled out results from our first live test. That’s thirty thousand clients, and another boy won’t lose his mom to dementia because she’ll know in her teens how to stay healthy. A young girl, knowing MS is thirty years down the road, will take proper care of her health and happily hold her grandchildren someday. But we’ve got to push harder. The establishment doesn’t want to put healthcare and vitality in the hands of the everyday common person, so we’ve got to get out there before it can stop us. This is allhands ondeck. We’re fighting for the future.
Even now, remembering that day, Alyssa felt the flush of energy that had filled her that afternoon. It was consuming and invigorating to be pursuing something pure and true and honest. And, from Alyssa’s perspective, it was the first true and honest thing she had known. The light after her own lie.
Then it all came crashing down.
That’s wrong, Alyssa reminded herself in the still darkness every night and now as she slammed the back door of her blue CRV. It never existed in the first place. In fact, if the rumors proved true, the only real business that had occurred at XGC came from Tag selling their data to pharmaceutical companies overseas.
Alyssa dropped into the driver’s seat. It was hot enough to instantly stick her T-shirt to her back and melt the tension in her shoulders. She closed her eyes in the warm quiet—until her thoughts crowded in again.
She tapped a button on her navigation system to head to the last place on earth she wanted to go, and the only option she had left.
2,175 miles away... Winsome, Illinois.
Home.
Chapter 2
“What does Andante even mean?”
Jeremy blinked. Those were not words he expected to hear at his grand opening.
The older man looked around the store, his face pursed as if Jeremy’s beans had burned or pulled sour and were stinking up the place. “What was wrong with the Daily Brew? I liked it just fine. What have they done to the place? It doesn’t feel like home anymore.”
Jeremy looked around the coffee shop, frantic to find something good to counteract the clench in his chest. He’d studied, dreamed, and planned for this moment for twenty years. Five minutes ago he’d been fired up, still nervous enough to throw up in the tiny back bathroom, but satisfied with the remodel and confident in his decision to move across the country to Winsome and open it. He then thought about all that came with both the shop and the move. He now lived near his daughter. She knew his name and his face. She called him “Daddy.” He had an apartment she could stay in, one with two bedrooms and a view of Winsome’s Centennial Park. No... no way could he have afforded any of this in Seattle. This was the life and the home he wanted and there was no room for regret, doubt, or naysayers. It worked. It all worked. Yet even as he cycled through all the good to reassure himself, he watched the man move through the line, eager for confirmation.
When Jeremy had unlocked the coffee shop’s alley door at four o’clock that morning, it was because he was too excited to stay in that apartment-with-a-view a single minute longer. 4:02 found him reorganizing the baked goods he and his assistant, Ryan, had made into the wee hours of the morning, whipping up batch after batch of blueberry muffins—hoping no one would suspect they came from a mix. At 5:15 he was rubbing a final coat of oil into the wood counters and every table in the seating area until they felt like velvet. He had then flipped on the lights at 6:25 and stood marveling at his own shop for a full five minutes before he twisted the front door’s deadbolt at precisely 6:30 and flipped the custom-painted sign.Open for Business.
Now Jeremy’s gaze trailed the old man’s movements as he turned his head this way and that, taking in every detail. He wondered what the man saw and how it could possibly displease him. It was a little coffee shop bathed in the warm light of vintage bulbs. It featured thick unfinished wood tables with every chair tucked perfectly beneath. It boasted exposed brick walls interlaced with plastered sections just waiting to display good art. And the showpiece—a glass-encased gas fireplace—sat situated between two buttery leather armchairs. How could anyone not love this place?
Jeremy looked to each customer standing in line for approval. No one held that look of awe-tipped admiration he’d anticipated. In fact, in the few hours since he’d opened, he noticed more than a few people looking sour, questioning, and discontent. And far fewer customers than expected had wandered through the doors.
In the two months after he bought the place, right before he closed it for renovations, he’d experienced a greater draw than this. The previous owner certainly had. He’d checked her numbers again and again, and once he took over, his observations and daily take mirrored her reports. Eighty percent of the day’s revenue came in from 6:30 to 10:00 a.m., caffeinating the commuter crowd on their way to the train station across the street. And that 80 percent alone brought in enough revenue to keep the shop healthy and vibrant. That’s how he knew he had a little leverage for the renovations. The math was in his favor—especially as he planned to bolster the numbers a little later in the day by drawing people back to sip his organic single-origin loose teas and munch on a shortbread cookie with their friends in the afternoon.
He looked at his watch: 9:00 a.m. Where was the commuter crowd this morning? He quickly walked the L from the side counter to the back one and the register, next to Ryan, as the older man and his friend shuffled forward to order.
Jeremy felt his smile waver before he set it fully. “Andanteis a musical term. It means ‘a walking pace.’ I wanted to convey that the coffee shop is a part of life as you walk through your day.”
“Didn’t a shop named the Daily Brew imply the same thing? And besides, where are we supposed to sit? I sat in the corner of my couch for over thirty years, right by that window. You don’t even have a couch anymore.” The man pointed a gnarled finger, the middle one—perhaps only because his pointer didn’t straighten?—toward the corner featuring the fireplace and two armchairs. He gasped. “The pillows... What have you done with our pillows?”
The man’s friend put a steadying hand on his forearm. “George.”
