Chapter 3
THREE
URGENT: Founder Meeting in D&E in five
I typed the words into Slack and pressed enter.
The response was near-immediate.
Brooke: Already there
I couldn’t stop a knowing laugh. Of course she’d been expecting a debrief.
I grabbed my laptop and headed to the door. Just shy of it, I doubled back, grabbed Cam by the elbow, and hoisted him out of the room like I was taking him straight to time out.
Matchify’s offices were located in a warehouse-style building in downtown Raleigh, with thick brick walls, high ceilings, and big windows.
We were a small but growing operation, and our space was beginning to feel more and more crowded.
Most of the employees worked at long desks out in the open—an area Brooke had dubbed the Love Pit.
There were only three dedicated offices, and mine was the biggest of them.
A space upstairs had become vacant, but we didn’t have the funds to take advantage of that. Not yet, at least. I hoped that was where Vantive would come in.
Two of our data scientists looked up at me as I passed. I waved but didn’t stop to chit chat, instead making my way to the first of three meeting rooms.
Darcy & Elizabeth was typed out on the wood panel over the matte-black door.
Brooke had insisted on naming all our rooms after famous couples.
She was still trying to sell me on themed decorations in them.
If she had her way, she’d turn Darcy & Elizabeth into something worthy of the next Bridgerton set, complete with bonnets, cravats, and canes.
As promised, Brooke was already inside, lounging in one of the five huge beanbag chairs, all of them varying hues of pink and magenta.
I usually ended up giving in to Brooke’s requests.
It was nearly impossible to say no to someone as sweet as she was.
To her credit, people used the beanbags way more than they used the table.
“Wait up!” Jackie ran up behind me with her laptop under her arm. It might as well have been an additional appendage for how infrequently she was seen without it.
I opened the door for her, and she slipped inside as Katie came around the corner.
Katie shot a look at Cam. “You should be opening the door, mister.”
“He’s too busy making trouble.” I set Cam inside the door and closed it behind me.
“Where’s Nick?” Brooke asked.
“Take a wild guess,” Katie replied, dropping into a magenta beanbag.
Jackie opened her laptop. “Lunch with his wife?”
“Bingo.” Katie stretched her neck from side to side.
She and Nick had been great friends when the five of us had started building Matchify. That was…no longer true. Katie had attempted to stage an intervention with Nick before he got married. He hadn’t taken that well.
In some ways, having Nick absent was nice—it meant less thinly veiled digs between him and Katie. But I valued both of their feedback, and to be fair to them, they did manage to keep things civil. Mostly.
I sank into one of the two empty beanbags and wiggled until I found a comfy spot. I had managed to say no to Brooke’s initial request for LoveSacs—it simply wasn’t in the budget—but when she found knock-offs from China for a fraction of the price, I’d relented against my better judgment.
The Affection Puffs had turned out decently, though. Not quite as firm as LoveSacs, maybe, but they did the job and gave Matchify a cool startup vibe that I was constantly putting at risk with my orderly, black-and-white-loving soul.
“Hear ye, hear ye!” Brooke said loudly, pounding her fist on her Affection Puff. “This official meeting of the Founding Five has been called to order by none other than Her Majesty, Vivian West.”
I tossed the heart-shaped stress ball next to my Affection Puff at her, and she ducked.
It rolled toward Katie, who picked it up and squeezed it. “How’d the interview go?”
“The first interview, you mean?” I asked.
Three pairs of brows went up.
“First?” Brooke repeated. “As in part of a sequence?”
I nodded. “He’s coming back tomorrow. And the next day.”
“What is this, a Dateline special?” Katie asked. “It seems excessive.”
Brooke covered her face with her hands. “I’d been hoping for a puff piece with rainbows and fluffy, soft cloud vibes—and maybe some baby animals.”
“Grant Wilder hates baby animals,” I replied.
“He does?” Brooke and Jackie said at the same time.
I shifted. “Probably.”
“It went that bad, huh?” Katie was always to-the-point.
I crossed my heels and folded my arms, grateful to be able to unwind a bit. For the next twenty-three hours. “Almost, but it’s no thanks to him that it wasn’t a total dumpster fire.”
The door opened, and Nick slipped in, slightly winded. “Sorry! What’d I miss?”
“Life passing you by,” Katie said under her breath.
I shot her a flat look, but I couldn’t blame her too much. She’d been very conspicuously left off the guest list at Nick’s wedding.
“The guy from Threadline gave Viv the third degree,” Jackie said, tapping away on her laptop, “and he’s coming back for more—twice.”
Nick’s brows shot up as he lowered himself into an empty Affection Puff. “Can’t you just decline?”
“Yeah,” I said, “if I want to risk things with Vantive. They were the ones who facilitated it—and they’re watching for the piece ‘with interest.’ Besides, my pride is involved now.” Cancelling the rest of the interviews would be tantamount to crying mercy.
“We could join the next two,” Brooke said. “Moral support.”
I shot her a look with a cocked brow. “Your last show of moral support wasn’t particularly helpful.” I reached over, grabbed the stress ball, and chucked it at Cam.
The ball nailed him in the shoulder, and he tipped backward, but the wall caught him.
“Nice shot,” Nick murmured.
“Besides,” I said, “this guy is smart. He’ll see exactly what I’m doing if I’m suddenly surrounded by an entourage. He can smell fear.” I could already picture that knowing look.
“What do we know about him?” Nick tossed one of the stress balls into the air and caught it.
“Not much,” Brooke said, sounding more upbeat than before. She was always quick to bounce back. “He’s a senior staff writer at Threadline who chews up and spits out the companies he’s targeted.”
“We need more,” Katie said. “Gotta know your enemies.”
“Or,” Nick countered, “you could decide not to go into things antagonizing him. You attract more bees with honey, right?”
I stared at him for a second, considering the alternate approaches.
“This guy doesn’t do honey. He’s subtle yet aggressive.
” I conducted a half-second mental review of the interview and shook my head.
“The antagonizing has already been done by him.” That might’ve been a stretch.
He hadn’t really said anything outright rude or aggressive, but given the tone of his questions and his history as a journalist, I stood behind my statement.
Katie clapped three times. “Let’s cyber stalk the man already!”
“I tried,” Brooke said. “He has no social media presence—or else he’s got Fort Knox-level privacy settings.”
Katie looked at Jackie, whose eyes were on her computer. They flicked upward after a second.
“Work your dark magic, woman,” Katie said.
“You’re like my little shoulder devil,” Jackie said with a frown.
Katie seemed pleased rather than offended. “Oh, come on! There’s gotta be something you can do to help Viv out—without breaking any laws.”
Jackie looked at her for a second, then her mouth lifted at one edge. “Fine. Lemme see what I can dig up.”
Katie grinned, and both she and Brooke scooted their Affection Puffs closer. Nick and I got up and stood behind Jackie, leaning over to observe.
Watching Jackie at work was mesmerizing. Her fingers—little blurs of movement—flew across the keyboard. Windows opened, closed, multiplied, vanished.
She made a frustrated noise after a couple of minutes. “This guy is a digital hermit. His Facebook profile has got to be ten years dormant at the very least, and all I can see is his name and a pixelated profile picture.”
I leaned in to try to make sense of the vaguely familiar blob, but a different window popped up before I’d made any headway.
“Columbia grad,” Jackie said. “I can show you every article he’s published on Threadline, obviously, but this guy is definitely not your get-ready-with-me-video type. He’s a private person.” She couldn’t mask the hint of admiration in the comment.
“Who loves to expose other people.” Brooke sighed.
“Sounds to me like a man who’s got something to hide,” Katie said. “Pull up that picture you found, Jack.”
Jackie obeyed, and I was accosted by a screen filled with Grant’s picture.
He was seated, leaning forward with his elbows on jean-clad knees (did the man own nice clothes?), his expression neutral except for the slightest…
twinkle? That wasn’t the right word. Whatever it was, it took away any overly serious vibes and made him seem personable.
Or like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“I wish he weren’t so hot,” Katie said with disappointment.
I gave her the death glare. Compliments—even reluctant ones—weren’t helpful.
Jackie sat back. “Evil people are always super hot or super ugly. It’s an unspoken rule.”
“So, this is all we’ve got?” I asked. “A picture, some generic info from his college days, and a bunch of articles that are tantamount to a wasteland of the companies he’s knee-capped?”
Jackie shrugged. “Unless you want his next piece to be about how Matchify’s lead developer went to jail for breaking all sorts of cyber laws…yes. This is the extent of it.” She closed the laptop lid. “You’ll have to do your recon the old-fashioned way.”
“Break into his house?” Katie’s head tilted to the side as she genuinely considered the idea.
Jackie turned to look at Katie, her eyes narrowed and mystified. “What is wrong with you? No! Observation. Questions. Conversation. That’s the old-fashioned way.”
“The boring way,” Katie mumbled.
“Conversation,” Nick said, squeezing the stress ball until it disappeared in his hand. “Like flirting?”
“Viv doesn’t flirt before running statistical models.” Katie went still, then snapped her fingers. “Can you get him to create a Matchify profile?” Jackie opened her mouth, but Katie cut her off. “A public one. Squeaky clean!”
“If he has no social media, he’s not about to tell Matchify his deepest secrets.
” I stood straight and smoothed my slacks.
“I just need to get through the next couple days. That’s all.
Brooke, maybe you can help me run through potential questions.
He’ll ask all the ones we don’t want to answer—he’s already made a lot of headway on that front. ”
Brooke gave double thumbs up.
“And we”—Katie snatched the stress ball out of the air when Nick tossed it, then squeezed it in her fist—“will be waiting in the wings to take him out if the opportunity—I mean, need—arises.”
It wouldn’t come to that if I had anything to say about it.
Grant Wilder would leave in three days with two things: respect for Matchify and a total lack of anything he could use to hurt us.