17. Talia
Talia
Silicon Valley had a thing for naming places after trees—even “Palo Alto” meant “tall tree”—and the Manzanita & Oak was no exception.
On its face, it was an upscale hotel, but everyone knew the sleek glass-and-wood building was really a watering hole for the engineers, software programmers, and AI enthusiasts of the Valley looking to network.
Tonight, though, it was home to the Techie Singles Mixer, a dating event for people just like Talia who didn’t want to go to Madera.
(Madera—which meant wood—was a restaurant and bar inside another tree-named hotel, Rosewood Sand Hill, and it had a reputation for women on the hunt for wealthy, divorced venture capitalists looking to acquire trophy wife number three or four. That was definitely not Talia’s scene.)
Pushing her Omni 3Ds back up her nose, she walked into the Manzanita & Oak’s interior courtyard, a green, leafy sanctuary with teak chaise longues for relaxing in and a small, burbling waterfall surrounded by orchids growing out of the stone.
A jazz quartet played in the far corner under a canopy of palm trees, and servers flitted in and out of the mingling crowd, carrying trays of hors d’oeuvres—mini cones filled with beet tartare, duck spring rolls, and bite-size crab cakes topped with a dollop of crème fraiche and a snip of chive.
A perky woman at a table at the entry greeted Talia. “Are you here for the Techie Singles Mixer?”
“Yes. Talia Morgan.”
The woman checked for her name on her laptop, nodded, and handed over an electronic name tag with Talia’s name preprogrammed onto it. The background changed colors every two seconds.
“You can customize it if you want. Just scan that QR code for instructions.” She pointed to another table just a few feet away, where a cluster of new arrivals were paying no attention to each other and were instead intently focused on tailoring their name tags just so.
Talia laughed. It was so typical of her industry that even at an event designed to meet other people, their priority was still the technology.
But hey, Talia was one of them, too, so she shuffled over to the name tag programming table and took a few minutes to get hers the way she wanted it.
First impressions mattered, and in a crowd like this, it didn’t say great things about you if you let your name tag remain on the generic default.
(Erin had been right that people really, really loved the ability to personalize their accessories.)
After changing her name tag from the obnoxious two-second color cascade to her favorite color, Ideal Life’s particular shade of purple, Talia took a deep breath and plunged into the crowd.
As predicted, the ratio in the Manzanita & Oak’s courtyard was heavily gender-skewed in Talia’s favor.
In Silicon Valley, it was estimated that there were 40 percent more single heterosexual men than single women.
Before she could even grab a crab cake for herself, Talia was approached by a red-haired man with what could only be described as a very earnest, open face.
“Hey, Talia,” he said, reading her name tag.
“I’m Colin. I’m thirty-seven years old, I work in sales for Future Rapidity Software, I have three young boys who are sweet, chaotic hellions, and I’m looking for a career woman who is smart and wants a family but maybe doesn’t have time to start her own and therefore would be interested in my children as a ‘quick start.’ ” He chortled at his joke.
Yes, chortled.
“Oh, um, wow,” Talia said. “That’s… a lot of information.”
Colin shrugged and chortled again. “Well, I find that the introduction part of these events is the most awkward, so why not tear it off like a Band-Aid and get it out of the way?”
Talia chewed on her lip. Even though she already knew Colin wasn’t going to be a match—his kids were probably lovely, but she was not looking to dive straight into the deep end of the pool when it came to having a family—he did have a point about not wasting time at a mixer like this.
Finding the right person was a numbers game, Talia figured.
In theory, what you needed to do was go on as many first dates as possible and then cut them off and never do a second date if the first one wasn’t promising.
In the past, though, she hadn’t had the luxury of time to run this experiment properly.
But now, with the watch on her wrist, she did. That’s why she’d chosen the mixer—there was a high density of single men in one location, and if she didn’t like one of them, she wouldn’t have to waste time. She could cut it short and rewind and use those minutes on someone else.
“It was really nice to meet you, Colin,” she said.
He wrinkled his brow, confused by the abrupt end of their conversation.
Okay, she could have been smoother, but it was fine. She was about to rewind, and he wouldn’t remember any of this anyway. It will have never happened.
“Good luck with finding a brilliant stepmom for your boys,” she said, and she really did mean it. Then Talia turned the crown on her watch.
In reverse, Colin’s face went from confused to awkward to optimistic, and then he was walking backward away from her, she was un-reaching for the crab cake she never got, and then Talia was again at the edge of the name tag table.
She gave herself a few seconds to find her bearings.
One—the room stopped wobbling as her vision readjusted.
Two—she dismissed Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth, who was tutting over Talia’s brief disorientation and corresponding cortisol spike.
Three—memories of the Tinder murder came back, and Talia decided to take off the glasses for the night. Maybe it was better if she interacted with these dates on her own. Not that there was anything wrong with Ideal Life, but… She stuffed her Omni 3Ds into her purse.
Then she stepped once more into the crowd.
But this time, as Colin approached, Talia turned left and power walked directly to the nearest server.
“Crab cake?” he offered.
“Why, yes, thank you.” She actually took two, just in case she got sidelined again before she could acquire more.
And indeed, just as she polished off the second delicious bite, a man in the typical Silicon Valley “dressed up” outfit of a blazer over a T-shirt and jeans came up to her.
Except he had a huge food stain on the front of his shirt, and it wasn’t like he’d accidentally dropped an hors d’oeuvre on himself. More like he’d spilled a strawberry milkshake on it several days ago but hadn’t bothered to change yet.
Talia braced herself, but a slim, compact man in a clean button-down and khakis swooped in, linked his arm through hers, and steered her away.
“Thought I’d save you the trouble,” he said in a slight German accent once they were a safe distance away from Milkshake Stain Guy.
“Thanks, Oskar,” she said, reading his name tag. It alternated between his name and a quote that streamed across the electronic surface: “Eternity resembles a wheel that has neither beginning nor end”—Hildegard von Bingen.
“Interesting quote,” Talia said.
“Ah, yes,” Oskar said. “ ‘Die Ewigkeit gleicht einem Rad, das weder Anfang noch Ende hat.’ One of my favorite lines from a German abbess in the twelfth century. It encapsulates the profound philosophical concept of the nature of eternity in such a concise and poetic manner, do you not agree?”
“Hmm,” Talia said. Whether she agreed or not wasn’t the right question. A better one was, Could you imagine spending the rest of your life with a man so pretentious he opened conversations like this?
“It was nice to meet you, Oskar. Thanks for sparing me from Milkshake Stain Guy.”
Like too-earnest Colin, Oskar furrowed his brow at Talia’s sudden end to their conversation. She wiggled her fingers in farewell, then turned the watch knob.
Okay, back at the side table. Name tag set.
Talia stepped into the breach once more, avoided Colin of the sweet hellion sons, snagged a couple of crab cakes—still delicious—dodged Milkshake Guy, thereby avoiding Oskar coming to rescue her, and found herself at the bar next to a tall, broad-shouldered man in a fitted white T-shirt (very bright and clean) and pressed, dark jeans.
She tried not to stare at his impressive biceps and pecs—“eyes up here” applied equally to men as to women!
—and focused on his face. Which was also impressively chiseled.
Talia swallowed hard and tried to find words.
He flashed incredibly straight teeth.
Too straight. Veneers?
“Hey,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Thaddeus.”
Talia shook his hand, still not sure what to say to someone this beautiful.
But also, he seemed a little young. Not that there was an age minimum to attend this mixer. But Talia was thirty-five, and Thaddeus was…?
“So, Talia,” he said, leaning against the bar. “Tell me something fascinating about yourself or that you’ve recently learned.”
She startled a little. Not in a bad way, but she had expected some small talk first. Although, she supposed, it was a nice change to have someone ask about her, rather than blurt out everything about themselves—or a pretentious quote—first.
“Something fascinating, huh?” It was difficult to come up with a good one on the spot.
“How about something a little odd but interesting? I was listening to a podcast the other day about how it’s possible that a very intelligent life form lived on Earth long, long before us, but we wouldn’t know, because if their technology was sufficiently advanced, it’s possible that no trace exists anymore, or if it did, we don’t yet have the means to detect it.
And I have to admit I buy it, even though the podcast went on to posit that the life form could have been a kind of cephalopod—like, superintelligent octopuses. ”
Thaddeus arched a brow. “That is odd but interesting. I like it.”
Talia smiled. “Now your turn. Tell me something about yourself.”
“I believe that Atlantis exists. And I’m going to find it.”
She blinked. “Oh. Um… okay. Tell me more.”