The Backup Plan

Chapter 7: The Number You Heard

Monday started the way Mondays do.

Six-forty alarm. Shower. The same shirt I'd worn Friday, because I hadn't done laundry and didn't have a reason to care. Norah was still asleep when I left. She'd been up until three, and so had I, and neither of us said anything at the door because there was nothing to say that hadn't already been said with the light off.

I took the train in.

At the stop before mine, I pulled out my phone and called my mother. Seven-forty, which was criminal, but she answered on the second ring, which meant she'd been up for an hour, which meant she'd been up for an hour for years.

"Ethan."

"Morning."

"Are you sick?"

"No."

"You sound like you're on a train."

"I'm on a train."

"Are you sick?"

"No, Ma. I'm not sick. I've been working on something."

Silence. The kind she does when she's deciding whether to be angry or to wait.

"For how long."

"Two years."

"Two years of what. You have a job. You have a job at that place with the — the chips in the break room, you told me about the chips."

"I still have the job." I watched the parking lots go by. "I built something on the side. A program. For small businesses. I sold it."

"Sold it to who."

"A company out in Cupertino. Brightbridge."

"What does that mean, sold it."

"It means the product’s theirs now. I go in for three years as a consultant. Some money up front, some of it later."

"How much up front."

"Ma."

"How much, Ethan."

"Forty million. Before tax. And it’s not all cash — there’s stock in it, and the consulting year is paid out over time. Forty is the number on the page. It’s not forty in my hand."

The train went under a bridge and the signal dropped and I don't know what she said in that gap. When it came back she was crying, which I hadn't heard her do since my grandfather's funeral, and she was also, somehow, mid-sentence about Norah.

"— has she eaten. Is she eating. You don't cook. You don't cook and you never did and your father was the same, he'd eat a piece of toast standing up over the sink —"

"She eats."

"Does she eat breakfast?"

"She eats breakfast."

"I'm going to come up. Saturday. I'll bring the —" and then she did the thing where she can't finish a sentence because she's crying and pretending she isn't. "Two years. Ethan. Two years."

"I know."

"I'm not mad."

"You're a little mad."

"I'm a little mad." She blew her nose. "But I'm coming Saturday and you're going to introduce me to her properly, not the way you did at the — at the dinner, where you stood in the doorway like you were delivering a package."

"Okay."

"Okay." A breath. "Does she know?"

"She knows. She knew before anybody."

Another silence, but a different one.

"Good," my mother said. "Then she's the one."

I got off at my stop at eight-fifteen and walked the four blocks with everybody else, past the coffee stand, past the parking structure, past the security guy out front who always nodded at me because I always nodded first.

The lobby of Harlow Tech is glass on two sides and the front desk sits under a white halogen fixture that makes everybody look gray. I'd walked through that lobby for three years.

The girl at the front desk looked up.

Her name was Priya and I'd said good morning to her maybe four hundred times and she'd said it back maybe four hundred times, and we had never once talked about anything else.

That morning she looked at me like I'd walked in wearing a different head.

"Morning," I said.

"Good morning, Ethan." Her voice came out an octave higher than usual. She looked down at her screen and then looked up again. "Um. Congratulations."

"Thanks."

I kept walking.

She was still looking at me when the elevator door closed.

The floor was already loud, but it was a different loud. There's a sound an open office makes when everyone in it is pretending to work while trying to hear something three desks over, and I'd spent enough years in that room to know it exactly. Friday afternoon the company had sent out a short note about the acquisition — a paragraph, no names, "a Bay Area company has agreed to acquire certain products from a Harlow Tech employee." And HR had been walking the floor half the week before that with a clipboard, which meant somebody was leaving. Put the two together and you get a floor that already knows.

I sat down and opened my laptop.

Steve was three desks away with a mug in his hand. He wasn't moving. He wasn't even drinking. He was just standing there with his mouth open.

Ten seconds. Twenty. He came over.

He pulled out the spare chair and sat down, close, like we were in a meeting.

"Ethan."

"Yeah."

"So the — the Ledger thing."

"LedgerLite."

"Right. LedgerLite." He put his mug on my desk. He was holding it so hard his knuckles had gone white. "That's yours."

"The code was mine. Two part-timers do support and the social stuff. The product’s Brightbridge’s now."

"Brightbridge." He looked past me at the window like the window had the answer in it. "Brightbridge."

"Steve."

"The number." He looked back at me. "Is it the number I heard."

"It's the number you heard, and it's not the number I keep, and that's all I'm saying about it."

He moved the mug an inch to the left, then picked it up again and set it down in the same spot.

"Ethan, some of the stuff I said. Back when you — the thing with you and Norah. Some of it was —"

"It's fine."

"It wasn't —"

"Steve." I stood up and clapped him once on the shoulder. "It's fine. We're at work."

He blinked at me. Then he laughed, a short awkward one, and went back to his desk with the mug, and I watched him sit and stare at his monitor for a while without typing anything.

At noon Dan put his hand on my shoulder at the coffee machine.

"Ethan. You got a minute? Let's grab lunch."

Dan was my manager. Dan had never taken me to lunch. Dan had, four months ago, followed me out to the parking structure after work and stood next to my car and told me, in a low reasonable voice, that I was throwing my life away, that Norah was not my responsibility, that I was young and I had a future and I should think about what I was doing before I did it.

I said sure.

We went to the Thai place two blocks over. He ordered for both of us and paid before I could reach for my wallet, which he had never done.

"Ethan." He put his chopsticks down. "Congratulations. I said it in the hallway but I want to say it here. I always thought you had something in you. Some people see it and some people don't, and I'll tell you honestly, I saw it."

I ate a bite of the noodles.

"And the other thing." He waved a hand. "The thing back around the wedding. I said some stuff that was coming from a good place. You shouldn't — you know. Hold it against me."

I put my chopsticks down.

"Dan. What you said was, 'You know what her situation is.' And then you said, 'Why are you making your own life harder.'"

He went still.

"That's — I was concerned. You were family to me, in a way."

"Sure." I picked up my tea. "I'm putting in my notice next month. The handoff's going to be a lot of work and I'd rather you knew now than in three weeks."

His mouth did something. Behind him a waiter was carrying a tray of soup and somewhere near the kitchen a phone was ringing, and I drank my tea, and I put the cup down, and I stood up.

"Thanks for lunch."

I left him with the check he'd already paid for and the noodles going cold on his plate. Outside it was gray and warm and a cleaning truck was going down the street spraying water at the curb, and I walked back to the office without hurrying.

The floor was worse in the afternoon than the morning. People I'd hardly spoken to in three years stopped at my desk. A woman from QA I'd never once worked with came over to ask how I was doing and stayed eight minutes. Two interns walked past twice. Nobody said the number directly, which meant everybody had the number.

Norah came by my desk at one point. She had a folder in her hand, and she stood in the aisle in front of me, and several people at the nearby desks were being very interested in their screens.

"Ethan."

"Hey."

"This is the —" and she dropped the folder onto my desk, "the version you promised me last week, and it's a mess, and I don't want to hear that you'll fix it in the next build, because the next build was in the version. I've been asking for this since August."

"Okay."

"'Okay' is not a plan." Her voice was flat and clear and it carried the way it does when someone is being professionally difficult on purpose. She looked straight at me, not one flicker, not a smile, not a wink. "I need it in writing, and I need the old tickets closed, and I need the acceptance criteria attached to the tickets, not in your head."

"Sure."

"Thank you."

She picked the folder back up, turned, and walked away.

Two desks over, Renee had stopped typing and was staring at Norah's back with a look like a person watching a cat slap a dog.

Later I found out what it cost her to keep her face straight through that, because apparently it was a lot, and she was very proud of it, and she told me about it that night like it was a heist she'd pulled off alone.

Renee cornered her in the kitchen at two-thirty.

"What," Norah said.

"Don't 'what' me."

"I always 'what' you."

"Did you know." Renee closed the door. "Answer in order. Did you know he was building a whole company."

"Not the whole time."

"What does that mean."

"It means I found out on Friday." Norah got a cup of water. "We agreed — he agreed — that I get the first week. So this week I'm the one who knows."

"Get the first week of what."

"Of the rest of it."

Renee put both hands on the counter. "Norah. Everybody looks at your desk when you walk past. He's got two interns doing laps. Someone in sales said eight million, someone in engineering said eighty, nobody will say it to his face."

"Then nobody has the right number."

"You're not going to tell me."

"I'm not going to tell you."

"Am I your friend?"

Norah took a drink of the water and put the cup down.

"You are my friend," she said. "And you're the first one to ever ask me the real question. Not the money one. I noticed that, and I'm going to remember it, and I'm still not going to tell you."

Renee stared at her and then started laughing in a kind of helpless way.

"You're impossible."

"That's been said."

"Was it him who told you the —" Renee waved a hand. "The morning thing. Is that real. He gets up at five."

"He gets up at five."

"To work on his —"

"To work on his thing. Since before I met him." Norah rinsed her cup and put it upside down on the drying rack. "For two years, I thought it was just what he's like. Some people run. He gets up at five."

Renee said something about finding herself a man who did something on the side. Norah said that was not a strategy. Renee said it was the only strategy. The door opened and someone came in to heat up a lunch and they both shut up and that was the whole conversation.

The rest of the week it kept coming.

Thea in accounting found my LinkedIn from 2019 and messaged me to say she'd always thought I was "quiet but sharp." Kevin from infrastructure — different Kevin — stopped me in the hallway to ask if I'd be "open to advising" on a thing he was trying to start. Somebody forwarded me a Slack thread about me by accident, on purpose, I couldn't tell.

I answered the ones that had a question in them and let the rest go.

I didn't open the dashboard at work anymore. I'd stopped a week earlier, because it had started doing something to me — a clench in the chest at eight-forty in the morning that had nothing to do with the numbers themselves. There was a blog post by then, then a second one, then a newsletter person. The app had a small Twitter that didn't post anything. Small business people kept sending me emails at eleven at night, in lowercase, about their inventories.

Monday night Norah was on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table, and her phone rang. She looked at it and showed me the screen.

"Your mother," she said.

I answered it.

"Ethan. Put her on."

"Ma."

"Put her on, I was talking to her —"

I handed Norah the phone and went into the kitchen and started cutting up an apple. I could hear her voice through the doorway in one word out of four. She was saying something my mother liked, because my mother kept laughing.

Then Norah's other phone buzzed on the coffee table, the one with the work group chats and the family stuff, and I looked down at it while she was talking to my mother.

The screen said:

**Aunt Frances.**

And under it, in the preview line:

*Hi sweetheart I hope you're sitting down because your aunt has been thinking…*

The call went to voicemail. A minute later she called again. Norah looked at the screen, looked at me, put my mother on hold.

"Hello?"

I put a piece of apple in my mouth and kept the knife moving.

"Hi, Aunt Frances."

I could hear the shape of it from across the room without the words — that particular sweetened upward tone people use when they've decided, after long deliberation, to be generous.

Norah said uh-huh. She said that's kind of you. She said I'll tell him. She said we'll see. She did not smile once and she did not raise her voice and she did not put her hand over the phone to look at me.

At the end she said, "Okay. Goodnight."

She hung up and went back to my mother without a word about it.

The second thing came twenty minutes later, after she'd hung up with my mother too, and I was still in the kitchen with the apple down to its core, which I'd eaten down to the seeds and left on the counter.

Chloe had texted her.

Norah read it out loud in the same flat voice she uses for work emails.

"'Oh my god Norah, my mom just told me the craziest thing about Ethan, is it true, you have to tell me everything, when are you free, Derek wants to meet him properly, did you know Derek's been working on a deal in the same business as your husband, isn't that such a coincidence.'"

She put the phone face down on the table.

"You're going to peel that too far."

"Peel what."

"The next one. The peel's half an inch thick on the last one."

I looked down at the cutting board. The skin was all in one long strip, and it was thick enough to make a belt.

"Okay."

"Just eat it. I'll do it."

She came over and took the knife and the next apple out of the bowl and moved me off the cutting board with her hip. She peeled with a shorter stroke than I did and the strip came off thin and even.

"Aunt Frances tried to apologize."

"From the sound of it."

"She said she was sorry if anything she's said over the years came across wrong, and she always thought I was the strong one in the family, and that if I ever want her to talk to anybody on my behalf she'd be happy to." She dropped the strip in the sink. "She also said the offer still stands for Chloe's wedding, that it would mean a lot to her and Uncle Ray if you and I would come, but she understands if we're busy."

"You want to go?"

"Not today." She cut the apple in half. "You didn't look up once."

"Was I supposed to."

"No." She put one half in front of me on the counter. "That's what I said to her in my head while she was talking. Not even out loud. I just thought it."

"Okay."

"She still doesn't know."

"Know what."

"That she ever said anything wrong." Norah bit into her half. "She thinks the last ten years went by and everybody's fine and I'm the one who kept the family at arm's length. She'll keep thinking that. I'm not going to explain it to her."

"Okay."

"Which means she wins the last word with herself forever." She chewed and swallowed. "Fine. That's the price of being the one who's right and not wanting to do a whole seminar about it."

I took the half she'd left me.

"I don't know if that's the price."

"It's a price." She walked back to the couch with her half in her hand. "Tell me if my ex is ever going to call. Justin. The one from the mall."

"I don't know."

"He'd hear it from Derek. Derek's in finance. He'll say it at dinner and my aunt will say it louder and it'll go around."

"Maybe."

"If he calls me."

She sat down and didn't finish the sentence.

"If he calls me," I said, "tell me first."

"Sure." She looked at the TV, which was off, which meant she was looking at her reflection in it. "I don't need you standing over my shoulder while I answer the phone."

"I know."

"But I'll tell you after."

"Okay."

She was quiet for a minute and then she said, in a normal voice, "The front desk girl asked me if I was your wife today. Like she was confirming it. Like there was an error in the file."

"What did you say."

"I said yes."

"Was it an error in the file."

"Apparently." She turned the TV on for the noise. "Apparently it was a whole update. The file had me as the woman he married anyway. Now the file has me as the woman he married. They had to reissue the version."

I sat down on the other end of the couch and didn't say anything because there wasn't anything to say that she wasn't already saying better.

We watched something for an hour. I don't remember what. Her feet were on the table and mine were on the floor and the apple halves were gone and the peel was in the sink and her phone was face down on the table with Aunt Frances's name in it and Chloe's message under it.

The call to my mother was done. The work thing was done.

Everything else was still in front of me.

Two nights later, on Wednesday, Norah made instant noodles and we ate them on the coffee table with the news on low, and at nine-thirty exactly her phone rang, and I saw her face change before I saw the screen.

She looked at it for two seconds.

Then she looked at me.

And she picked it up.