He replies with a thumbs-up.
“You ask the questions,” I tell Elodie. I want to see how good she is at thinking on her feet. “If you need me to jump in, we should establish a code.”
“I’ll ask what time it is in London,” Elodie suggests. “She’s from England, right? So that’ll be your cue to jump in and save me.”
I nod. “Perfect.”
Elodie strides ahead of me, but I can see by her posture that her confidence is shaken. While she takes a deep breath to compose herself, I reach past her and knock.
The door cracks open, tethered to the frame by a chain. A pair of the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen greets us, so vibrant and piercing that I feel like they’re accusing me of something. The woman’s eyes look at me and then at Elodie.
“Yes?” she says. Polite. British. “Can I help you?”
It’s dark now, the Connecticut autumn sky a particular type of black that only happens this time of year. The flickering streetlamp does little to illuminate us.
Elodie stiffens her shoulders, mustering up some renewed confidence. “We were sent to help you address a complaint,” she says. “I’m Elodie. This is Margaux. I believe you spoke with our supervisor earlier this week.”
We never use last names—only first. At the start, Mr. X tested the use of pseudonyms, but it went bad when one client did an extensive online search and started calling a woman with the same first name, convinced she was one of us. Almost blew our entire cover when the woman threatened to call the police for harassment.
The door closes. Elodie gives me a quizzical look, but I grab her wrist when she tries to knock again. A moment later, there’s the clattering of a chain, and then the door opens fully, revealing the woman inside the house.
Erin Casimir, our new client, is tall and thin and elegant against the backdrop of her cheap rental condo. It’s evident that she was raised to carry herself with dignity and grace—it’s not her fault that things all went to shit when she got older.
In our briefing, Mr. X told me that she’s from an upper middle-class family in London. Her older brother came to America to study at Yale while she was working toward a medical degree in St. George’s. After her brother hit it big, something happened. The specifics of that “something” are a question mark, but what we do know is that she dropped out of medical school, became estranged from her family, and ended up here.
“Come in,” she says, peering briefly outside as though to make sure nobody is watching us.
Erin is our client, but I already suspect that her tech billionaire brother is where the real story lies. Does she think he’s watching us? Is her condo being monitored?
Inside, it’s clear that Erin is working on a serious budget. The couch is stained and secondhand, though she’s made an effort to shampoo and vacuum it. The same can be said of the gray shag carpet. Someone is shouting on the other side of the shared wall. A door slams, and Elodie flinches. I wonder if she’s going to be able to handle this.
I gauge Erin as she pours three mugs of hot water from a kettle on her tiny outdated stove and then steeps three tea bags for us and brings them to the couch on a cheap silver platter.
“Right,” she says, sitting on the armchair across from us. “I trust you know the situation, then?”
Elodie leans forward. “Your brother invented a budgeting app, Budgie, a few years ago. It was featured onGood Morning America, and that’s when it took off. Through a string of investments, it’s made him very wealthy and he landed inForbesfor becoming a billionaire by age thirty-five.”
“Iinvented the app,” Erin says, and she appears startled by her own outburst. “And I did it all by myself, before this AI nonsense started to take over the tech world. Our parents wanted us both to be doctors—our father is a cardiologist. All our lives, he told us that the only way he’d support us is if we went into medicine. He has this perfect dream, I suppose.”
I watch her cradle her mug of tea. Her hands are shaking.Elodie has the sense not to speak; she sees that we’re already getting straight to the point.
“I was always more into engineering and programming, but given my father’s demands, I was forced to treat it like a hobby. But I had fun playing around with app ideas, and I even made a little money.” Her eyes light up as she speaks about it, the passion coming back to her as she relives it. “A lot of big ideas start in a dorm room.”
“Even for a hobby, it would be a lot of work,” Elodie says, validating her feelings.
“It was.” Erin sips her tea. “And I didn’t expect it to be profitable. Most apps weren’t back then. I never even tried to get Budgie in the app store. After a few months—well, I got inundated with school and I didn’t have time to go back to it. But Bertram”—now her expression turns sour—“that’s my brother. He stole my work and passed it off as his own. I had no idea he’d done it until suddenly it was everywhere. Imagine my shock when a friend linked me to an American talk show I’d never heard of, and there was my brother on the stage, making up some phony story about how he’d come up with the idea.”
Her hands are shaking again, the rage barely contained in her thin frame.
I had worried about Elodie’s ability to handle this, but now I see that she’s exactly in her element with the opportunity to gossip. She effortlessly engages Erin by asking about her childhood—the overlooked younger sibling to a golden-child brother. He’s a narcissist, Erin says—no, no, a sociopath. But do her parents see it? Of course not. They love him. The wholeworldloves him.
By the time Erin has finished her tale, she regards Elodie like they’re old friends. “Can you help me?” she asks.
“Of course we’re going to help you,” Elodie says, clasping a hand over Erin’s. “We’ll make him pay.”
“How?” Erin asks. The emotions are raw, and she’s shed the cautious numbness she greeted us with at the door. Recalling all that she’s lost has been too much for her to contain. It’s not just the billion dollars her brother made off her hard work, but the love of her family, the respect of her peers. Even her own friends have distanced themselves, accusing her of being too angry, too obsessive, for not just letting it go.
“Hey, M,” Elodie says, acknowledging me for the first time since this impromptu therapy session began. “What time do you think it is in London right now?”
