“I thought Meta would dress her bridesmaids in black.”
“Yeah, well—that’s not how it played out.”
“So why are we here?”
“I think Meta’s having some pre-wedding jitters.”
“Okay...but why arewehere?”
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
She leads J to the elevators, and he isn’t at all surprised when she puts in a key and hits the button for the penthouse suite. How else are newly minted tech billionaires meant to live?
The elevator opens into a foyer, and even though V has the key, she rings a doorbell to announce their arrival.
It is Thor who answers. Like J, he is in a tuxedo. Unlike J, he looks like he’s never been in a tuxedo before. Everything seems just a little misaligned, and his posture suggests the whole outfit might fall to pieces if he makes the wrong sudden move.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Thor says to V and J. “I honestly don’t know what to do. Come in.”
Instead of a groom, he looks like a high schooler cast as a butler in a school play—J half expects him to ask to take their coats. Thor has always seemed young to J, but never nervously so. Now the nervousness seems to have risen to the surface.
“Where’s Meta?” V asks.
“In the bedroom.”
“And what’s going on?”
“She doesn’t want to go through with the wedding. Having her family here and my family—it’s too much.”
“Thor,” V says. “We’ve talked about this. Maybe itistoo much.”
J is surprised by her tone. It is not the sound of a coworker. It is the sound of an older sister.
“I know, I know,” Thor says. “Meta and I talked this over, many times.”
“How can you have talked it over many times? You’ve only known each other for months! And now you want to get married!”
J’s ears perk up further. She really doesn’t know they’re already married.
Thor looks at J, and all is understood: The secret is still a secret. J is here right now because he is the one who, through sheer accident, knows the truth.
“You love each other,” J says. “Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Thor says emphatically. “That’s not the issue here at all. The issue is the wedding, and how scary it is.”
“Let’s go see Meta,” V says. “It’s pointless to have this conversation without her.”
Thor leads them to the bedroom. There, Meta is lying on the bed in leisurewear, staring at the ceiling. Next to the bed is a mannequin in a wedding dress, hovering like an angel or a ghost.
“Hello, Meta,” J says.
“Hello,” she replies, not moving. She sounds worn out and looks like a teenager with a migraine. J feels they should be talking about whether or not she feels up to going to class, not whether to call off her wedding.
Thor sits down at the foot of the bed and tenderly puts his hand on Meta’s ankle. “We appreciate you two coming over,” he says to J and V. “We didn’t know who else we could talk to.”
For months now, J has seen Thor as a minor character in V’s story, the young boss who whisked her away and then took the town while she burned the midnight oil. Now he rewinds the story and plays it with Thor as the main character—a nineteen-year-old whiz kid who had been immersed in his Secret Project since high school, who had probably never left Sweden until the money guys came calling. So he moved to Manhattan with a crew of adults; of them, V was probably the most human, since she worked in publicity, not programming. His family stayed behind. His friends, if he’d managed to have any in high school, stayed behind. Then he met a girl, and suddenly she became New York City to him. He didn’t make other friends, except possibly a few of hers. He lost himself in love before he ever found himself in any other way. Now, when life wobbles, V is the closest person he has who isn’t Meta.
And Meta—she may have stayed nearer to home than Thor, but the fact is that even if she has relatives and friends in other rooms of the hotel, none of them have been summoned to this suite. Which speaks volumes to J as well.
