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I tiptoe out of the room, leaving the door open, and walk down the hallway to the room I’ve been staying in—my parents’ old master bedroom. Too many memories kept me from moving into my old room. I left it empty. Nora is in my sister’s old bedroom.
I disseminate a trail of clothes behind me as I walk from the bathroom to the bed, where I collapse onto the mattress, exhausted from working overtime at the office and covering everyone’s shift. Still, I can’t help but smile at the serendipitous circumstances that brought Marissa and me together today. What are the chances? It must be a sign.
Yeah, but I can’t expect the universe to keep helping me if I don’t help myself first. On impulse, I hop off the bed to retrieve my laptop from downstairs. Back on the bed, I log into Clinlada’s servers and, skimming the boundaries of unethical behavior, I check the patient appointments directory.
“Mari, Mari, Mari. When is your next check-up due?”
There. I finally pin her name down. She’s due for her next exam in two days at 6p.m.
No one could fault me if I happened to cross the lobby at the same time, now, could they?
10
MARISSA
Coders’ folklore has it that when his girlfriend dumped him, Mark Zuckerberg got drunk, got in front of a computer, and coded an early precursor of Facebook.
When Johnny Raikes dumped me, I created The Ex Files. It’s my secret job.
By day, I’m COO at WeTrade, a FinTech app that lets its users trade stocks in small or large quantities with no commission and in a user-friendly way even the most technological averse can get used to quickly. And we do it ethically, without lacing our app with addiction triggers to incentivize higher numbers of trades, even if the more people trade, the more money we make. We want our users to be happy investors who make a profit, not milk every last dime out of them like some of our competitors.
By night, I secretly run The Ex Files—an app that automatically deletes all pictures of your ex from your phone. What originated as a joke with my sister became a reality during my sophomore year in college.
I was a computer science major, which gave me all the coding knowledge I needed to create the app, to which I added a business minor to learn how to actually make it profitable. It didn’t happen right away, but the first version of the app is one of the main reasons I ended up working for a FinTech start-up. Shonda, the CEO at WeTrade, to whom I disclosed my involvement with the app in my first job interview fresh out of college, was impressed by my work and hired me on the spot.
I was one of the first employees at WeTrade, when the company was just a room in a dingy basement with a few desks. In the beginning, Shonda offered me a tiny salary and an attractive stock options package. I accepted, and that choice paid out since WeTrade is currently valued at 5.05 billion dollars. And while that doesn’t make me a billionaire like my best friend, it sure makes me set for life—money wise. Add the extra income from The Ex Files, and financial security isn’t a worry in my life. It’s everything else that sucks. I’m a thirty-four-year-old, single attachment-phobe, not brave enough to risk her heart in a relationship.
And all because of what happened on prom night sixteen years ago. In a way, the breakup with John shaped my entire life, not just the romantic aspect. If that night hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have created The Ex Files and I probably wouldn’t have stood out to Shonda at the interview. I’d probably be less wealthy, but perhaps happier? I don’t know; playing a game of what ifs is useless.
Anyway, now, The Ex Files has been downloaded forty million times in over fifty-one countries, making it a business I can’t run on my own. It’s grown to a thirty-person company between coders, customer support, and business managers. It’s all done remotely, we don’t have a headquarters, and no one knows I run the app, except for my employees, Blake, Shonda, and Teresa. I’ve always wanted to avoid having to explain how the idea for The Ex Files was born. Even Blake and Shonda only got a watered-down, I-saw-a-market-opportunity-and-took-it explanation. Only my sister knows the real origin story because, well, she was there.
I could quit my day job at WeTrade and focus solely on the app, but I don’t want to let anyone down. I also like having to get out of the house in the morning. If I worked from home 100 per cent of the time, I’d just hole up in here and never see daylight again.
Just sometimes I think I have too much on my plate, and if I get pregnant… I shake my head. If I have to make adjustments, I will. For now, I can still handle everything. I’m good.
And the beauty of The Ex Files is that we have to do little to no marketing. People actively search for us because guess what? Hearts get broken daily all over the world, love sucks, and so many people need to purge their phones of painful memories.
We’re about to release our biggest update yet, a new version of the app that doesn’t delete pictures but edits them, erasing the undesirable ex from the image so that people don’t have to lose their memories, but can simply wipe them free of unwanted presences.
I bring my laptop to bed and open the log page for the update. Nothing eases my stress more than debugging code.
I save a backup version and begin working on the new one. I’ve sorted through about a hundred lines of code, fixing a couple of syntax bugs, when a pop-up window appears on my screen.
Danika: Is that you, boss, debugging code?
Danika is the chief coder for the app. She’s stationed in Sri Lanka. Midnight in New York is 9.30a.m. for her. She’s already up and working.
MayTheFrameBeWithYou: Yep, it’s me
MayTheFrameBeWithYou: What’s up?
Danika: Have you thought about making the new update reversible?
I sigh. Yes, I have, but she won’t like my answer.
MayTheFrameBeWithYou: Yeah, and I still think it’s not worth delaying the launch over
MayTheFrameBeWithYou: And we’d be cluttering people’s storages with duplicates
