Page 65 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
She pauses, like I’m supposed to thank her. But I am not grateful—I am grateful’s opposite. This woman, rich enough to take a last-minute flight from San Francisco, powerful enough to rid a room of all its people with two words, is a stranger. She’s worse than a stranger.
“I don’t need you to be proud of me.” I lift my chin, force my voice steady. “You don’t know me at all.”
My mother blinks, something like surprise twitching at thecorner of her mouth before she quells it. “That’s not true. I know that, at eighteen, you did what most people will never do. That you’ve managed to build something with true value and sell it to the world. That you can code an algorithm and compose yourself on live television, both. You’re remarkable.”
“Anyone could see that,” Miller says. He has his good hand on the table, fingers fisted into his palm. “Anyone who’s been paying attention knows all that.”
Something flares, hot, behind my rib cage. Here is someone who knows me, and someone who does not.
“I was really proud,” I tell her, “until I realized something I made is hurting people. And that everyone here”—I point behind me into the office—“has been keeping it from me.”
“So because of that, your work means nothing to you? It’s dispensable?” My mother folds her fingers together on the table. “Tell me, what does Vera think?”
I falter, breath hitching in my throat. In my silence, she keeps talking.
“I’ve respected her right to privacy from the start. But if she’s the one pressuring you to call this off—”
“Vera’s dead.” It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. I’m furious—beyond furious, almost spilling over with it—that she’s brought Vera into this room. If Vera was still here, she’d have been the first person I talked to about this. I want her so badly it leaves me breathless, but instead I have my mother, name-dropping Vera like she has any right to speak of her at all. “And no one’s pressuring me. I’m capable of making decisions on my own.”
My mother straightens her already perfectly vertical spine, rising even taller. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “But you can’t let one scathingNew York Timespiece take you down. If you want to make waves, people are going to get mad at you for splashing them. That’s the way.”
“These aren’t splashes.” Blowing up my own dream is painful enough; I didn’t think I’d have to defend the decision. I especially didn’t think I’d have to defend it to her. “These are people’s lives.”
My mother lets out a short, impatient exhale. “Don’t let others impede your path, Rose.”
“What, like me and Dad?” It’s out before I can think it through. “Like we impeded yours?”
My mother’s nostrils flare. “No,” she says. “Not like that.”
“Really? Because it sounds like it. And maybe making money was more important to you than the impact you had on us, but that’s not true for me.” I lean closer, heat rising in my throat. “We’re not the same. MASH is fucking up people’s lives. Nothing’s worth that.”
“It’s not about money.” Her voice has a frayed edge to it. “It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. It’s about pride in your work. Fulfilling your potential. Forging a path all your own, as you see fit.”
“It hardly feels like my path anymore,” I tell her, realizing it’s true in the same moment I say it. “All these questions you’ve been adding, this bullshit scientist in California who thinks we can predict what kind of cereal people will eat on their eightieth birthday or whatever the hell—”
“Every app needs to be nimble and fresh to stay relevant,”she says. “That’s the inconvenient reality. But the algorithm you wrote, the Core Four—you uncovered something incredibly powerful. Don’t give up on it now.”
“Did you take the survey back then? When it was just the four?”
She hesitates for the briefest moment before nodding.
“What did it say?” My voice sounds scraped, and I swallow. “About your kids?”
My mother breathes, and I watch the controlled rise and fall of her chest. “It said I would have one child, of course.”
I close my eyes. I thought, last summer, that I could use MASH to parse this out—to make sense of my mother and the choice she made. But MASH only knows the facts, the indisputable truth of my mother’s one child, which changes absolutely nothing about the reality of her leaving me. You can have a child without being a parent. You can have a child without loving them. The divide between her MASH results and our shared reality is wide and wild and painful. It’s Vera’s gray area, the unquantifiable place we really live in.
“If that was fated,” I say quietly, “then why did you act like you had none?”
When she finally speaks, the words are low and forced, like she’s sifting them carefully through a fine opening. “I wanted you to see a woman put her own dreams first.”
“And this was the only way you could think of to do it? By disappearing?”
“I’ve been reaching out to you for years—”
“A hundred dollars on her birthday?” Miller says, and I look at him. I think of Willow, throwing her bags on the floor of that New York hospital room and hiding his broken body against her own. “I don’t think that constitutesreaching out.”
“I’ve done more than that,” she says, and I actually laugh. “The moment I caught wind of MASH, I knew XLR8 would be the perfect platform to amplify what you’d made. I did not hesitate. I—”
