Page 69 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
I nod, swallowing through the clenched fist of my throat. “Okay.”
“But for her to keep her involvement from you, and to show up here and take you by surprise—” He breaks off, and I recognize that same twitch in his shoulder from the night in our kitchen when Vera was still alive. He’s angry, and he’s trying to hold it in. “It should always be up to you to decide what kind of relationship you want to have with her.”
“I don’t want a relationship,” I say quickly. “She hurt you.”
Dad’s eyebrows draw together. “This is about what you want, Ro, not how I feel.”
I think of my thirteenth birthday, Dad and Vera and Willowsinging to me while Miller passed out cake forks. The small stack of birthday presents with my mother’s on the bottom, that same card, thin and forbidding. The wordless way Dad passed it to me over the table.
“But she took everything from you,” I whisper.
“Not everything,” he says, leaning closer. “We were so young when we had you, Ro. She wasn’t ready.”
“And you were?”
He smiles a little. “You’re never ready for your world to change like that. But I only had to meet you once to know you were going to be the best part of my life, no matter how scared I was of messing you up on my own.”
My eyes sting with tears, and I roughly wipe them away. “But I already betrayed you by getting into tech. I didn’t want to betray you by connecting with her, too.”
“Honey.” Dad leans toward me, and I look up at him. “You could never betray me by being who you are. By choosing the right path for yourself.”
“I don’t know if it’s the right path,” I say shakily. “Everything’s falling apart.”
“This isn’t your fault,” he says. “How much MASH has grown, all the things it’s doing that you never meant for it to do.” He shakes his head. “There are people working at that company—there’s your mother—who should have stepped in when bad things started to happen. Who should have taken every measure to make sure they’d never happen at all. You understand that, right?”
I bite my lip, look across the room. I understand that, but I also understand that this idea—the seed of it, the innocuous thing thatgrew into the monster I’ve made now, started with me.
“I guess,” I whisper. “But I started it. And I’m the only one who wants to make it right, and now I have to find a way to do it without them.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone, though.” Dad catches my eyes. “All right?”
I think of Miller, his face thrown into shadow in the XLR8 garage. Of Maren, hugging me in her bed while I cried myself into fitful sleep.
“I know,” I say quietly. I draw a shaky breath, then ask the question that’s tugged me toward the dark bottom of myself ever since the article dropped. “Dad, what am I going to do after this?”
His eyebrows twitch together. “What do you mean?”
“What if this is as good as it gets?” The question hangs between us, simple and grim. “What if this is the best idea I ever have, and it went to shit, and I never do anything else?”
“Don’t be a nitwit,” Dad says, and I actually manage a smile. “You’re just getting started, Ro. There’s so much still to come.”
I look down at my hands, squeezed together in my lap. “I just feel like it’s my job now. To be this person MASH made me. And I don’t know what comes after.”
He leans close, lifts my chin so I have to look at him. “Your only job is to find happiness, Ro. To be happy.” He drops his hand. Through the windows behind him, it’s started to snow. “That’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted for you.”
38
“This is Maria Villareal,” my mother says, gesturing toward a photograph on the screen. It’s the day after Christmas and Miller and I are sitting stone-faced in the conference room at XLR8. On the wall, a girl with long dark hair smiles from behind a desk. “She’s twenty-three. When she downloaded MASH, she was working in sales and feeling hopelessly unfulfilled. MASH indicated she’d be a social worker. Now she’s back in school and thriving on her newfound path.”
This is The Big Plan: champion MASH success stories, ramp up the user-generated content we’re sharing to showcase all the people MASH has made happier. The statement Jazz’s team put out was brief and dismissive—MASH has helped more people than it’s hindered, andthis technology is rooted in indisputable science. As if that makes it okay; as if something cannot be both true and cruel at the same time.
In the few days since theNew York Timesstory broke, more and more people have spoken up about the results that crushedthem. More parents have posted their children’s stories online. In response, XLR8 spent the Christmas holiday ramping up our social posting, issuing press releases about product upgrades, and cranking out content just to scream louder than the people who are actually in pain.
And through it all, my mother has decided to stay in town.Just until New York, she said.Just until we’re back on course.Because why else would she stay here, in the place where her daughter lives?
We’re booked for theTodayshowa week from Friday, an appearance Jazz had to pull out every single stop to keep. The media is split on us: half think we’re poison, half seem game to watch how we pull ourselves out of this quicksand. So we’ll fly to New York, missing the first Friday back at school. Miller and I have almost two weeks to figure out how to stop this train.
My dad’s coming on the trip this time, like he can turn himself into a human wall between my mother and me. Even now, as she pulls up the next MASH success story, he sits outside the conference room watching us like a hawk on the hunt. I’ve heard him every night since she got here, whispering angrily into the phone after he thinks I’m asleep.You can’t just spring things on her, Meredith. She’s not a kid anymore.The way they act around each other reminds me of the beginning with Miller: you can tell, when they’re forced to look at one another, that it hurts.
