Chapter 27
Five Years Ago, Winter Park
“What do you think?” Beau asked when he appeared in my semipermanent residence—a cabana at the Ritz-Carlton with a view of the golf course.
He handed me an iPad with a real estate listing already pulled up.
“Isle of Sicily?” I pushed my sunglasses into my hair. “Sounds like it should come with a drawbridge. It can’t possibly live up to the promise of its name.”
“Pam says it’s one of the most coveted addresses in Winter Park.”
Pam. The realtor Beau had enlisted for our house hunt. We were putting down roots. Beau had Pam, and the only friend I needed was Cody, my cabana attendant.
“If we’re going to be here, let’s be here,” Beau had said a few days ago while we were having drinks in the lobby bar.
“Hmm.” I had listened while sipping a margarita.
The floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the view opened on hinges, and the way they had been left ajar sent a cool sunset breeze drifting through the space.
Everything about this new life of ours felt soft and unhurried, and the easy calm found its way into parts of me that I’d held tense for years.
A few weeks in, and house hunting already sounds like too much clawing and competing for the person I was letting myself become.
“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you talked to your money manager this morning?”
“The discount on taxes afforded to permanent residence here definitely doesn’t hurt.”
“You think that’s why Bezos did it?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “And we should, too.”
Everything was “our” and “we” these days.
Beau and I gave up California without blinking, and we were living in a hotel suite with ironed sheets and little chocolates on our pillows every night.
And every time I reached to cover a bill, he beat me to it—quick, casual.
He was buying the house, too. By the eighth time I tried to chip in on anything, I understood this was his new side quest. Making a life here. Making a life with me.
“I love you. I want to take care of things,” he had said one night when I tried to pick up the tab for Popsicles at the poolside stand that sold hats and sunscreen. “I sold my company. I rebooted my life. And this”—he pointed to the space between us—“is the part that makes it all feel real.”
I’d been right to think reinvention came easier with Beau. He steadied me and made the world less sharp. But buried beneath all my lovesick optimism was a truth I never saw coming.
I hadn’t known then the hand Beau had in the end of my career. In the end of Redwood.
Is that why he kept picking up the tab? Did he feel guilty?
If he did, he didn’t mention it. He spent his days driving around Winter Park, examining prospects with Pam while I lazed in a cabana.
“We don’t need the most coveted anything,” I said when he found me that day, handing the iPad back to him. “As long as it feels like ours.”
“That’s what I told Pam. And she suggested we meet with a designer.” He flipped the device’s screen to a series of CAD drawings, renderings of what the place could look like after a total overhaul.
He wasn’t just buying a house. He was sketching a new life for us. A closet for me. A home gym for him. A pool where we could watch the afternoons stretch into evenings. Paradise.
“This is nice, but we should at least ask about a drawbridge,” I teased.
That’s when Cody rounded the corner of the cabana to hand me a fresh drink. Beau accepted the drink on my behalf as I padded back to my post on a daybed.
“What do you need your laptop for?” Beau asked as he looked over the spread I had assembled—a plate of fruit, a breezy novel, and, yes, my MacBook.
I shrugged and said, “Sometimes the Net-a-Porter preview window is a little too small on my phone.”
A casual lie. The kind that would make Beau laugh. He loved the idea of me running up charges on his black card, procuring a new wardrobe to match our resort-style life.
But the truth was that I spent my free time digging far too deep into the Redwood breach on my laptop.
A month after the first headline came screaming into view, the fallout was still everywhere. Gossip, lawsuits, and think pieces on the cost of centralizing security data spread like dandelion seeds, impossible to contain once they caught the wind.
Simon tried throwing money at the damage—charging James and a crisis PR firm to stem Redwood’s nosedive in public opinion while an army of lawyers tried to stop the bleeding as former customers banded together in a class-action lawsuit.
James was uncharacteristically deft in his work, finally shedding light on why Simon had kept him around all this time.
He lined up interviews, fed reporters a decoy villain in the form of “a disgruntled contract,” and even had every cable chyron echoing his talking points for a little while.
But no amount of media triage could save Simon or Redwood.
Because while the leaked customer data was the start of the hack, the fatal blow to Redwood’s image was the emails. Simon’s emails. Five years of private correspondence spilled out in a tidal wave, signaling Redwood wasn’t the only target for the hack. Simon was, too.
Strategies, planning documents, and emails between him and me became public, each one spiking into his coffin like a rusty nail.
It’s how my number got out to a pool of reporters.
Why I had to change it. Why I didn’t give my last name out freely.
People couldn’t stop talking about every little detail of the hack, and their questions served as fresh reminders of my humiliating termination.
I wanted to get as far away from that version of me as possible.
The silver lining was I could dissect the email trove. It felt like I had been handed a postmortem on my own termination. I knew when Simon had turned on me—he barely looked at me after that last meeting with Beau.
But one question haunted me in the quiet moments of my day—of which there were now plenty—and that was: Why?
I read through reports and message chains, following a breadcrumb trail that never left me sated. No matter how far down the threads seemed to lead.
It was jarring to see how often Simon and I had communicated while I was in his employ.
I had lived those years, of course. But there was something about seeing the hours of my life tallied up in black-and-white emails that cast a harsh light on exactly how much of myself I had handed over.
And for what? I responded to messages around the clock as he pinged about research he wanted me to do, mistakes he needed corrected, and presentations—some real, others euphemistic—that he insisted we “work on.”
I found small comfort in knowing neither of us had ever slipped up and revealed the details of the intimate relationship between us. But my name was a pervasive player in the Reddit threads that analyzed Simon’s downfall.
And speculation wasn’t easing up anytime soon now that the email leak had revealed something far worse than Redwood’s flimsy cyber security.
Simon had been quietly developing a surveillance empire. Once it dominated the current market, the only way for Redwood’s profits to grow was to reinvent itself.
And Simon had his sights set on a vision that would take Redwood from home resource to a product with the kind of reach that gave me chills.
He wanted cameras on street corners, feeds from doorbells and phones.
He wanted data pulled from cars. It would all be fueled by AI powerful enough to curate and catalog every detail. The new consumer? Government agencies.
Privacy would disappear as Simon’s Orwellian machines gobbled up every corner of daily life.
The brief glimpse Simon had once given Beau was only the tip of the iceberg. But when Redwood collapsed, the technology died with it.
“Find anything good?” Beau asked, handing me my drink.
I looked between the laptop and him. “Huh?”
“Net-a-Porter? I thought you were shopping.”
We curled up in the daybed, a tangle of arms and legs, and I let my Simon research slip into the recesses of my mind.
We had a house to build.
It took time for the house to be ready—a month of late mornings in cabanas and dinners at Lemon & Fig.
I know. I am God’s strongest soldier.
Before I knew it, though, I was standing in the backyard Beau had shown me—the one with a sweeping green space that went down to a dock—as lake water lapped gently against our shore, and the moss dangling from towering oaks swayed gently in the breeze.
A low pontoon boat crept along in the distance, and we could see the shells of the Rollins College crew team as they lined up for practice.
The renovation was nearly completed, and as we looked out at the glistening lake, I felt light and a little giddy. Look up “old Florida charm,” and it would have called up this exact view.
It was like stepping into someone else’s life—a softer, quieter one. And I decided to pretend that this version of me had been the real one all along.
We’re home.
I leaned in. I gave away all of my old work clothes, and bought a designer wardrobe of athleisure, resort wear, and maxi dresses. I’d decided I’d never need to think the words “business casual” again. I changed my number and deleted all of my old social media accounts.
Este Todd from Simon’s email hack kept attracting reporters and internet sleuths.
Este Todd can’t come to the phone anymore.
When the renovation wound down, our new home was ours to enjoy, along with lazy days on the lake.
We brought back side quests and got into water sports, like wakeboarding and stand-up paddleboarding, and we spent a few nights a week at Marcus’s restaurant, sitting at the bar and chatting with him between courses as he popped out from the kitchen.
With some encouragement and a generous member sponsorship from our new neighbor Will Somerset, Beau negotiated our entry to one of the coveted clubs in town—Interlachen Country Club.