“I heard that.”
David smiled and changed the topic. “What’s that wonderful smell?”
“Try it.” Jill handed him a slice of coffee cake resting on parchment paper. It was still warm to the touch. “I’m using a different cinnamon, and I’ve added almond extract to the batter. Also rosemary. Tell me if it’s too much . . . I’m trying out some new ideas.”
“Does the new coffee shop have you nervous?”
Jill looked past him out the window. “The Daily Brew didn’t compete too much with us, but I don’t know what baked goods Andante plans to sell. And the Sweet Shoppe could use something new, don’t you think? Mom held on to some of our recipes since I was born.”
“Good baking is timeless.”
Jill shrugged. “But I need to make something new, do something different. You don’t grow any other way, do you? You don’t stay sharp. I mean, things change whether we want them to or not.”
David nodded. He heard fear in her voice and couldn’t blame her. Losing her mother bit by bit, memory by memory, was a terrifying thing. Losing your sense of home was hard too.
Jill cast her gaze back out the window toward Andante. “I should’ve gone over to introduce myself during those couple months before he closed for renovations, but”—she shook her head—“it was a rough spring.” Her eyes filled.
“Jill?”
She snuffled. “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Drummond. I’m just tired today.”
“You could probably start calling me David, don’t you think?”
She laughed. “Wouldn’t that horrify Mom? No . . . I don’t think I could get used to that.”
“I understand. I hope you get some rest soon.” He raised the square of coffee cake in thanks and turned to walk out the door.
David took a few steps down the sidewalk, then stopped and stared at the new coffee shop across the square. It felt strange not seeing the old hand-printed Daily Brew sign with its red poppy border mounted above the door. It had hung there since 1977, the very summer he and Betty moved to Winsome.
He chuckled softly. The only stable thing in life is change, he thought, and no, you don’t get used to it.
Chapter 1
“You’re free to move; we can run your interview out of the Chicago office. We’ll be in touch.”
Alyssa threw another Tums in her mouth and cracked down on chalky grape. She played the message again, for the fourteenth time in three days, and while the words gave her no new hope, this time she focused on tone. Was there a lightness in Special Agent Denek’s voice? Did he sound relaxed? Optimistic?
Once determined to make the call, unable to avoid it for another day, Alyssa had rehearsed what to say countless times, written out two different conversational scenarios, and hadn’t drawn a real breath during her fifty-eight-second message—and power-chewed six Tums afterward.
Denek’s reply had taken seven seconds.
Alyssa scanned her apartment. Three years. In a whirlwind, she’d moved from Chicago to Palo Alto, started a new job, signed a lease with a new colleague, and moved into this now-empty space. Well, the space downstairs. This one they moved into only eight months before on the promise of a huge raise—a raise that never came. Yet despite that, she and Meera thought they had arrived—even while working fifteen-hour days more often than not.
After all, they had two bedrooms with a living room and a small balcony in a three-story walk-up just blocks off Stanford’s campus. They stood in line at chic coffeehouses bumping shoulders with Nobel Laureates and Silicon Valley legends, not to mention the up-and-comers—who could be anybody from the slick Euro-dressed woman in the pencil skirt or the jean-clad skateboarder who hung his board off his forearm as he ordered an oregano-infused Ethiopian pour-over. They paid twenty dollars for an arugula salad with beets and goat cheese and convinced themselves they weren’t still hungry.
And they’d held their heads high too. She and Meera knew they were mere worker bees, but they worked for “the” company—the newest and, some said, the greatest of the unicorns. The one that was not only going to make the Uber and Twitter IPOs look like chump change, but the one that saved lives, whole generations, from the chronic illness epidemic that was “engulfing the modern world.”
Now there was nothing left.
Like many Vita XGC employees, Meera made the call to the special agent in charge of her division months ago and moved back to New Jersey as fast as she could load the U-Haul. She had taken most of her furniture with her—including their bulletin board with Alyssa’s spare car keys hanging from a peg.
For six months Alyssa had been left with only her bedroom furniture, a few plates, an armchair, and the unrealistic hope that the scandal would soon blow over. The furniture she’d sold that morning. The plates she packed into the last box that rested on her counter. And her hope, along with the last of her savings, had fizzled out at new job interview number seventeen.
Sliding the box onto her hip, she grabbed her keys and headed down the tiled stairs. The building felt empty. It was empty. Everyone else was at work.
She scrawled her manager a short thank-you note. He had let her out of the lease four months early. It was a gift she hadn’t expected and one she desperately needed.
The parking lot was empty too. There was no one to see her off or say good-bye—of her friends from Vita XGC, there was no one left. Period.
Three years in California, and the end of the dream came with a seven-second message from an FBI agent and her key plinking to the bottom of a metal drop box.
When federal agents had escorted every Vita XGC employee from the six-story, state-of-the-art, glass glory of an office building six months ago, just days before Christmas, most thought it was a joke. There was even some jostling in the parking lot that led to handcuffs and stern words. But as the sun set that afternoon, the mood changed. The manic chase for fun that had dominated company events outside the office twisted into the competitive paranoia that had reigned within. Sunset started with whispers, speculation, and glares. Darkness descended in silence with the FBI releasing anxious employees by department late into the night.
Though unstated, Alyssa assumed a “Don’t leave town” was implied that night. After all, they’d shut the doors, taken away the CEO, and set up interviews for the executives, who lawyered up right on the spot. And the rest of them followed suit, hiring lawyers within the next two days. Yet to Alyssa’s surprise, her lawyer, a young gunner at Perkins and Coie costing $250 an hour, told her that within those two days a lot of XGC employees fled town.
“As long as the FBI knows where to find you, it shouldn’t be a problem. You need work, and in a post-Theranos Silicon Valley, no company will want the liability of an XGC hire.”
Alyssa dismissed his counsel that day, certain he was wrong. She needed him to be wrong—going home wasn’t an option. But after sending forty resumes across the country with no reply, and sitting through seventeen failed interviews locally, home was now her only option.
As she shoved the box into her car, her mind cast back to her last-ditch effort, only days before, to remain in Palo Alto.
Interview seventeen began like all the others . . .