The Cookbook Collector

Emily wanted to talk further, but Milton manned the waffle iron just steps away. “The green light means they’re ready, right?” he asked.

“Let me get you a platter.” Emily was reaching for one when Jess burst through the door bearing an umbrella stand for the sunflowers.

“Come sit,” Emily told Laura. “You too,” she called to her sister, who was using the sprayer from the kitchen sink to fill the umbrella stand. “Everybody has to eat a lot of fruit salad.”

“Did you get Bruno’s halcyon-days e-mail?” Milton asked as they sat down together, eight at the table, counting Meghan in Kevin’s lap.

“Bruno’s out of town, so now it’s open season?” Emily asked lightly.

“I had to look up halcyon,” said Laura.

“These are the halcyon days,” Alex declaimed in his best imitation of Bruno. “But the days are numbered when we can spend as we choose and operate without scrutiny …”

“With a public offering comes public accountability,” Milton chimed in with his own version of Bruno’s German-Swiss accent.

“Move the syrup, hon,” Kevin warned Laura, as Meghan’s little hand stole across the table.

“He talks too much,” Alex said of Bruno.

“That’s his job,” Milton pointed out.

Alex rolled his eyes.

“Still angry?” Emily murmured.

“Well, how would you feel?”

“I think I’d be a little patient,” said Emily. “And wait for my idea to settle in, and see if maybe there were ways to develop it. If there was a different context …”

Alex looked at her with his dark eyes. “It’s easier to be patient when you have some hope of success.”

“He’s just got a crush on you,” Jess told Emily after the guests had left, “and you’re a little mean to him, don’t you think?”

Emily tore off plastic wrap to cover the fruit bowl. “How am I mean to Alex?”

“You ignore him.”

“I do not.”

“You pretend you don’t know how he feels.”

This was true, but Emily didn’t know any other way to behave. She needed to work with Alex.

He thought he loved her, but what did he know? He had finished college at eighteen and founded a company before he could drink legally. To Emily’s knowledge, he’d never had a girlfriend. He’d fixed on her the way a hatchling fixes on the first moving thing it sees. He looked at her longingly, helplessly. Watched her as she walked down the hall, e-mailed her logic puzzles he thought she might enjoy, left chocolate on her desk.

“It’s strange,” Emily said. “It’s difficult. It’s like having a secret Valentine every day of the week.”

Jess knelt down and rearranged the sunflowers in the umbrella stand. “You have to give the guy a little credit.”

Emily leaned over the counter to glimpse Jess in the pass-through between kitchen and dining room. “I can’t lead him on,” she said.

“But he’s devoted,” Jess murmured. “You have to give him that.”

That night, as Emily lay alone in bed, she called Jonathan.

“Are you excited?” he asked her.

“Well …”

“Emily!”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. And nervous.”

“Why?”

“So much is happening, and so much is changing.”

“Nothing really changes.” Jonathan’s deep voice was totally assured. This was one of Jonathan’s great gifts, the voice of experience even where he had none. His own company was only a little over a year old, but he and his partners were storming the data-security market. They had developed a product called Lockbox, which encoded data and transactions for a growing array of Internet vendors. An image of a tiny treasure chest, the Lockbox logo was beginning to pop up at the bottom of Web pages everywhere.

Fast Company called Jonathan a wunderkind. Red Herring dubbed him a tech genius—but there were many tech wunderkinder starting companies. Jonathan was something rare. He was brilliant cryptographically, with a command of every aspect of his company’s Internet security products. And he was also an intuitive businessman—fearless, pragmatic, unyielding at the negotiating table where he always got his way. He upended all the stereotypes. He was like a fighting Quaker. A charismatic geek. “The only thing that changes is people’s perceptions,” Jonathan reasoned. “You just keep on working like you did before.”

“Don’t you think perceptions are important?”

“No,” he said immediately. “Facts are important. Tomorrow everybody’s rich. Anyone who has a problem with that is either ungrateful or jealous.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Hey, you earned that jealousy! Enjoy it.”

“It’s complicated,” Emily confessed.

“Is Alex giving you a hard time again? Is he making you nervous? Fuck him. Seriously, Emily. You’ve been working toward this for how long?”

“Three years.” She couldn’t help laughing at herself. She knew the time frame was absurd.

But Jonathan’s background was in computers, not business. He measured companies in dog years. “Now you get to reap the rewards.”

“I love you.” Emily laughed.

“Tomorrow is going to be amazing.” He spoke thinking of his own company as well, his own IPO, a dazzling coming-out party for ISIS in a matter of weeks. “Say it.”

“Amazing.”

“Repeat after me. Tomorrow is going to be amazing. Incredible. Fucking ridiculous.”

It was so good to hear his voice. He said the things she only whispered to herself.

“Tomorrow is going to be historic!”

“Well, every day is history eventually,” she teased.

“You know what I mean.”

She sighed happily. “I know what you mean.”

“So don’t be modest. You don’t have to be modest with me. Just think what you did! There was nothing in that space and you …”

“… and Alex and Milton …”

“… said: Let there be Veritech. And there was Veritech. And it grew and grew….”

Squeezing her eyes shut, she remembered an old film from science class where flowers bloomed in time- lapse photography. Rain drenched the desert and suddenly, petal by petal, second by second, in saturated Technicolor, all the cactus flowers opened.

This will be the final boarding call….

She started from her reverie. “Is that your flight?”

“Yeah, I’m going,” said Jonathan.

“Well, hurry.”

“Enjoy it,” he told her. “And just remember …”

“I don’t want you to miss your plane.”

“When you see the—” His phone cut out as it sometimes did, possibly low battery, possibly call waiting, and he left her wide-awake in bed, with the rush of his voice in her ear.