The Perfect Wife(88)

71


With a jolt, you realize you’ve arrived at Scott Robotics. The parking lot is empty except for Mike’s black Tesla. The Uber drops you off and drives away.

Inside, the place is lit only by the screensavers of the Scott Robotics logo that flicker from every screen—an animated S that chases its own tail, over and over, so that it becomes an upended infinity sign. Every screen is in perfect sync—that was something Tim had insisted on, you remember: He spent weeks niggling at the designers because there was a tiny lag, no more than half a second, between some of the screens.

It got fixed, of course. Everything Tim wanted got fixed in the end.

Mike’s over at the far side, by Tim’s office. “What makes you say she’s alive?” he says without preamble.

“I’m in touch with her.”

He’s silent a moment. “Does Tim know?”

“He’s always believed she’s alive. That’s why he built me—he thinks I can find her.” You pause. “I haven’t told him we’re in contact, though.”

Mike exhales. “Good. Don’t tell him. It’s the kindest thing. Think about it—he’s already done the hard part. Five years without her. Five years of grieving, of going all the way to the bottom. If he finds her now, and she doesn’t want to come back…It’ll break his heart all over again. And he won’t recover, not a second time—”

“Stop bullshitting me,” you interrupt.

Again he’s silent, considering you.

“I know you helped her. It’s what you do, after all. Sort out his messes. Protect him from his mistakes. And you didn’t like Abbie, you told me so yourself. She’d come between you and Tim, distracted him from the company…She knew you were the one person who wanted her gone so much, you’d help her vanish. How frustrating it must have been afterward, when you realized it hadn’t worked. When her disappearance, and Tim’s reaction to it, threatened the company all over again.”

“Fascinating,” Mike says. “To be able to take such tiny scraps of evidence and build a pattern from them…But sadly, wrong.”

“You don’t deny you tried to stop him marrying her?”

“I don’t deny that, no.” Mike’s face is impassive. “But not for the reasons you think.”

“What, then?”

“I was trying to protect her,” he says.



* * *



—

He takes you to another office, the office of their HR director.

“Only two other people have a key to this,” he says as he unlocks a sturdy filing cabinet. When he opens it, you’re expecting something more dramatic than the neat rows of files and DVDs it actually contains.

Each is labeled in thick black pen. Emma-Lou Hunter. Valerie Steiner. Jaki Travis. Kathryn Hughes. Karen Yang…

All women’s names, you realize.

“They’re all here,” he says. “The ones we know about, anyway. The ones we had to pay. What Tim calls the tramps.” He turns on the TV, pushes a DVD into the machine, and presses PLAY. The quality isn’t great—it’s been filmed with a cheap video camera—but what it shows is clear enough. A woman in a chair, facing the camera, talking. There are tears on her face, although her voice is flat and unemotional.

“…He took me out for dinner, waited until the food came, and then laid it out for me in a matrix: Either you don’t want me and won’t fuck me, in which case you’re a prick-teasing attention whore; or you don’t want me and will fuck me just to get a promotion, in which case you’re an actual whore; or you do want me and will fuck me, in which case let’s go to the very nice suite I’ve booked at the Plaza Hotel…” The woman blinks back tears. “I’d said nothing, nothing, that could possibly make him think I was interested in him that way…”

Mike presses EJECT and the image cuts. He reaches for another DVD. You put a hand on his arm. “Please…I get the idea.”

“He’s a great leader,” he says softly. “A visionary. A genius, even. Just not a great human being. At least, not where women are concerned.”

“Was he ever…” You can hardly say it. “Was he ever like that with Abbie?”

“Oh, Abbie was the exception. The one he adored, the one he was going to marry. The mother of his kids. Right from the start. No, even before the start. He’d seen a video of her online, being interviewed about her art. That was the only reason he offered her the residency, because he thought she was insanely hot. And then, somehow, he got her to fall in love with him. But I knew it couldn’t last. I’ve seen it happen before. First he puts them on a pedestal, then…Wham. Suddenly they’re sluts and whores, just like all the others.” He gestures around the empty office. “Silicon Valley has a real problem with corporate sexism. Only ten percent of coders are female. Only five percent of leaders. At Scott Robotics, we’re considered role models for the industry because we have thirty, forty percent female staff. But then you look at the churn—the rate those women leave. Hardly any stay more than a year. And that’s because Tim only hires them if they’re hot. Then, if they won’t do what he wants, he freezes them out. You know what he said to me and Elijah, the last time we had to pay one off? ‘Women are cheaper to hire in the first place, so even when you factor in the payola, we’re still ahead of the game.’ As far as he’s concerned, it’s just part of the cost of doing business.”