Why the hell aren’t you answering your phone????
Friday, 4:44 p.m.
Call me. NOW.
Friday, 7:58 p.m.
Just got home. Rach, not naming names here for good reason, but I’m telling you, extricate yourself from last night. Please. Trust me. Just do it. Catch commercial and come home no matter the cost.
Saturday, 9:04 a.m.
You didn’t turn on international calling, did you? Damn it. Your career’s in deep shit, my friend. Get your ass home.
Sunday, 10:10 p.m.
Worked all weekend trying to cover for you. Why? Because I love you and I’m worried sick. If you have any sense of self-preservation, call me before you go into the office. Jim is LIVID. Your ass is on the chopping block and you need to be prepared.
She glanced at her mom’s messages. Just chatter. So she went to Isaac’s messages, her heart hammering so hard in her throat she wanted to puke.
Monday, 3:42 a.m.
At the risk of appearing pathetic and just a bit stalkerish, I miss you.
Monday, 7:57 a.m.
There are a great many things I could say, but I’ll only bother with this: I never would have taken you for such a power-hungry woman that you’d use your body as a weapon and another’s emotions as leverage to reach the next rung on the corporate ladder. Consider our affiliation terminated.
Bone-numbing cold swept through Rachel’s body as she blindly grabbed for the stop cord. The driver pulled to the curb, and Rachel staggered off the bus, bent down and retched, but nothing came up. Stomach cramps kept her bent forward. She blamed the tears on the urge to vomit.
Liar.
Forcing herself to rise to her full height, her damnable mind running through a thousand different scenarios, she keyed her phone open, selected her list of recent calls and tapped on Casey’s name. The call went through, rang just once and her coworker and best friend in the world came on. “You on your way to the office?” Her somber tone said everything, cementing the weight of the situation and confirming Rachel’s fears.
“Yeah.” Someone shouldered past Rachel with a sharp “watch it,” and she stepped out of the path of commuter foot traffic to lean against a storefront window. “How bad is it?”
“Hold on.”
Rachel heard Casey’s heels click across the floor. She stopped and told her paralegal to give her ten uninterrupted minutes. More heels on hardwood, this time approaching the phone, and then she was back.
“It’s bad, Rach. Really bad. How far away are you?”
“I’m going to spring for a cab in the hopes of getting there faster. So give me the short version.”
“You’re familiar with the dating app Date Me.”
“Sure. We’ve both used it.”
“For years, it’s been the world’s number one dating app. Friday morning, the investment section of the paper reported on Thursday night’s test run for Power Match and publicly predicted that it would become the new go-to for professionals who wanted to essentially skip dating and go straight to wedding bells. The capital-investment firm runby one Isaac Miller released a statement that touted advancements over Date Me’s psychological matchmaking methods, claiming to have built a better, more accurate system that will make Date Me’s app obsolete the moment Power Match goes live.”
“Sounds like a standard marketing ploy to generate interest.”
“It would have been...if the client hadn’t scooped Date Me’s lead psychologist—the same psychologist who developed Date Me’s proprietary questionnaires that determine the most effective means of matching couples. Rach, she had a watertight noncompete in place when she left. No working for any company that could be considered competition for two years. And no using, developing or in any way modifying software deemed proprietary for five years from the date of separation.”
“Oh, shit.” She couldn’t tell Casey what she knew. Not without making her culpable should the firm’s management or, worse, founding partners question her. So she swallowed the urge to tell what she knew and, instead, listened.
“It gets better.” Casey lowered her voice. “She only left nine months ago and Date Me is claiming she didn’t give them notice as per her contract. She just packed up and left. They found out, through the news report, about her alleged improvements to the selection software she originally created for Date Me, and they’re claiming that their primary global competitor is not only using their proprietary software, but also trying to damage Date Me’s market share, investment security, client retention—the list goes on. Their legal department outsourced this case to us Friday morning. They asked us to file an immediate injunction to stop all work on Power Match’s development and release, enforce the noncompete for the psychologist and seek damages from both the developer and the capital-investment firm funding this project. You know who Caffeinated Brainiacs obtained capital funding from, Rachel.”
Casey didn’t say his name. She didn’t have to.