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“I know you helped her. It’s what you do, after all. Sort out his messes. Protect him from his mistakes. And you didn’t like Abbie, you told me so yourself. She’d come between you and Tim, distracted him from the company…She knew you were the one person who wanted her gone so much, you’d help her vanish. How frustrating it must have been afterward, when you realized it hadn’t worked. When her disappearance, and Tim’s reaction to it, threatened the company all over again.”
“Fascinating,” Mike says. “To be able to take such tiny scraps of evidence and build a pattern from them…But sadly, wrong.”
“You don’t deny you tried to stop him marrying her?”
“I don’t deny that, no.” Mike’s face is impassive. “But not for the reasons you think.”
“What, then?”
“I was trying to protect her,” he says.
* * *
—
He takes you to another office, the office of their HR director.
“Only two other people have a key to this,” he says as he unlocks a sturdy filing cabinet. When he opens it, you’re expecting something more dramatic than the neat rows of files and DVDs it actually contains.
Each is labeled in thick black pen. Emma-Lou Hunter. Valerie Steiner. Jaki Travis. Kathryn Hughes. Karen Yang…
All women’s names, you realize.
“They’re all here,” he says. “The ones we know about, anyway. The ones we had to pay. What Tim calls the tramps.” He turns on the TV, pushes a DVD into the machine, and presses PLAY. The quality isn’t great—it’s been filmed with a cheap video camera—but what it shows is clear enough. A woman in a chair, facing the camera, talking. There are tears on her face, although her voice is flat and unemotional.
“…He took me out for dinner, waited until the food came, and then laid it out for me in a matrix: Either you don’t want me and won’t fuck me, in which case you’re a prick-teasing attention whore; or you don’t want me and will fuck me just to get a promotion, in which case you’re an actual whore; or you do want me and will fuck me, in which case let’s go to the very nice suite I’ve booked at the Plaza Hotel…” The woman blinks back tears. “I’d said nothing, nothing, that could possibly make him think I was interested in him that way…”
Mike presses EJECT and the image cuts. He reaches for another DVD. You put a hand on his arm. “Please…I get the idea.”
“He’s a great leader,” he says softly. “A visionary. A genius, even. Just not a great human being. At least, not where women are concerned.”
“Was he ever…” You can hardly say it. “Was he ever like that with Abbie?”
“Oh, Abbie was the exception. The one he adored, the one he was going to marry. The mother of his kids. Right from the start. No, even before the start. He’d seen a video of her online, being interviewed about her art. That was the only reason he offered her the residency, because he thought she was insanely hot. And then, somehow, he got her to fall in love with him. But I knew it couldn’t last. I’ve seen it happen before. First he puts them on a pedestal, then…Wham. Suddenly they’re sluts and whores, just like all the others.” He gestures around the empty office. “Silicon Valley has a real problem with corporate sexism. Only ten percent of coders are female. Only five percent of leaders. At Scott Robotics, we’re considered role models for the industry because we have thirty, forty percent female staff. But then you look at the churn—the rate those women leave. Hardly any stay more than a year. And that’s because Tim only hires them if they’re hot. Then, if they won’t do what he wants, he freezes them out. You know what he said to me and Elijah, the last time we had to pay one off? ‘Women are cheaper to hire in the first place, so even when you factor in the payola, we’re still ahead of the game.’ As far as he’s concerned, it’s just part of the cost of doing business.”
“So what happened with Abbie? How did she fall off her pedestal?”
Mike shakes his head. “I don’t really know. Some guy she kissed. One of Danny’s therapists, I think.”
“She didn’t kiss him,” you protest. “He kissed her.”
“I’m not sure that’s a distinction Tim would have taken much notice of.”
“No,” you say, remembering. “He didn’t.”
* * *
—
Tim really liked the way Magda worked with Danny. He started coming home early, watching the sessions and taking notes. Then one day you got back from buying groceries to find he’d brought along five members of his development team to watch as well.
“What was that about?” you asked later.
“I think we can use some of the same methods Magda uses with Danny to train our AIs. Once you understand the science behind it, it’s fascinating.”
After that, Tim threw himself into researching different kinds of ABA. That was when he found this great place called Meadowbank. It used ABA in a school setting, he told you eagerly. And its results were far, far in excess of anything Magda’s data sheets were showing.
Except that it wasn’t a great place. You hated it at first sight. The thought of sending Danny there terrified you. All this talk of aversives and contingent behaviors was just so brutal.
You did something you rarely did with Tim: You put your foot down. You said No.
Tim just carried on as if it was a done deal. Meadowbank had the best results, so Meadowbank was where Danny was going. End of. Anything else was just irrational emotional chaff. Women’s stuff.
In desperation, you told him you could get Julian back. You admitted he hadn’t really gone abroad. You confessed you’d only said that because he kissed you.
You thought Tim would be fine about it. After all, you’d put a stop to it the moment it started. What more could you have done?
But Tim wasn’t fine.
* * *
—
“You’re obviously going to fuck him. So I don’t know why you don’t just go ahead and do it.”
You were both shouting now. “What! Of course I’m not—”
“Admit it, you’re horny for him. I wouldn’t mind but I hate that you won’t be honest about it.”
“This is crazy—”
“What I do mind is that you’re letting your sloppy pussy dictate what’s best for Danny.”
“That is unforgivable!”
And you remember how Tim snickered. A weird, high-pitched giggle, like a little kid. “And yet somehow I think you’ll forgive me. Because you’re not about to walk out on all this, are you? The nice houses, the pretty dresses, the private jet. Not to mention all the quack therapists you waste your time and my money on.” He leaned in, too close. “You know what I do to sluts who think they can take me for a ride? I destroy them.”
You stared at him. “What sluts?”
He stopped. “Nothing. Just a figure of speech. Don’t try to twist this, Abbie. Don’t try to make this about me.”
* * *
—
“He wouldn’t let her simply divorce him,” you say. “She had to be punished. Shamed. For something that was only in his head in the first place.”
“He put her on dating sites,” Mike says. “Or at least, a chatbot version of her. He thought it was funny. He made the chatbot tell those men all the degrading things she wanted to do for them. In Abbie’s voice, with Abbie’s profile picture. It was childish and pathetic. But Tim thought it was hilarious. He could listen to it for hours.”
From Madonna to whore, you think. Just like it said in that book.
“I suppose I should thank you, then. For helping her get away.”
There’s a long silence. Then Mike shakes his head. “I didn’t, though. I wish I had. I would have, if she’d asked me. But she never did.”
“I don’t believe you. I found a picture of you at the Haven Farms fundraiser. If you didn’t help Abbie disappear, who did?”
“Me,” a voice says from the doorway.
You both turn.
“That would be me,” Jenny repeats.
72
“Mike tells people he didn’t like Abbie. I guess he told you that, didn’t he?”
The three of you sit around a table in a meeting room. No one’s turned on any lights. Even so, Jenny keeps her gaze on the table, not meeting either your eyes or Mike’s.
“The thing is, he’s lying. He loved her. Right from the moment he met her. I always knew he did.” Mike flinches, but she ignores him. “Perhaps love isn’t the right word. But infatuation doesn’t begin to cover it. He went…goofy over her. That’s the only way I can describe it. Something in him just kind of melted whenever she was around. Whereas me…”
She shrugs. In her Nirvana hoodie, she’s so tiny and boyish. So unthreatening. Androgynous, almost sexless. That was how she’d survived in this toxic environment, you realize: At some point, she’d simply turned into one of the guys.
At least, on the outside.
“As it went on, the fact she was taken—by Tim—I think that was part of the attraction, actually. The relationship between him and Mike…it’s pretty screwed up. When all’s said and done, my husband’s the beta to Tim’s alpha. I got used to that. But it would have been good to see him stand up to Tim, just occasionally.”
“Jen,” Mike says softly. “I love you. You know that.”
“Oh sure. Marriage, date night, picking out curtains, even sex…We can do all that. But sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice to be adored.”
“I do,” he says desperately. “Believe me, Jen. I do.”
