“Pam says it’s one of the most coveted addresses in Winter Park.”
Pam. The realtor Beau had enlisted for our house hunt. We were putting down roots. Beau had Pam, and the only friend I needed was Cody, my cabana attendant.
“If we’re going to be here, let’sbehere,” Beau had said a few days ago while we were having drinks in the lobby bar.
“Hmm.” I had listened while sipping a margarita. The floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the view opened on hinges, and the way they had been left ajar sent a cool sunset breeze drifting through the space. Everything about this new life of ours felt soft and unhurried, and the easy calm found its way into parts of me that I’d held tense for years. A few weeks in, and house hunting already sounds like too much clawing and competing for the person I was letting myself become. “Does this have anything todo with the fact that you talked to your money manager this morning?”
“The discount on taxes afforded to permanent residence here definitely doesn’thurt.”
“You think that’s why Bezos did it?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “And we should, too.”
Everything was “our” and “we” these days. Beau and I gave up California without blinking, and we were living in a hotel suite with ironed sheets and little chocolates on our pillows every night. And every time I reached to cover a bill, he beat me to it—quick, casual. He was buying the house, too. By the eighth time I tried to chip in on anything, I understood this was his new side quest. Making a life here. Making a life with me.
“I love you. I want to take care of things,” he had said one night when I tried to pick up the tab for Popsicles at the poolside stand that sold hats and sunscreen. “I sold my company. I rebooted my life. Andthis”—he pointed to the space between us—“is the part that makes it all feel real.”
I’d been right to think reinvention came easier with Beau. He steadied me and made the world less sharp. But buried beneath all my lovesick optimism was a truth I never saw coming.
I hadn’t known then the hand Beau had in the end of my career. In the end of Redwood.
Is that why he kept picking up the tab? Did he feel guilty?
If he did, he didn’t mention it. He spent his days driving around Winter Park, examining prospects with Pam while I lazed in a cabana.
“We don’t need the most covetedanything,” I said when he found me that day, handing the iPad back to him. “As long as it feels like ours.”
“That’s what I told Pam. And she suggested we meet with a designer.” He flipped the device’s screen to a series of CAD drawings, renderings of what the place could look like after a total overhaul.
He wasn’t just buying a house. He was sketching a new lifefor us. A closet for me. A home gym for him. A pool where we could watch the afternoons stretch into evenings. Paradise.
“This is nice, but we should at least ask about a drawbridge,” I teased.
That’s when Cody rounded the corner of the cabana to hand me a fresh drink. Beau accepted the drink on my behalf as I padded back to my post on a daybed.
“What do you need your laptop for?” Beau asked as he looked over the spread I had assembled—a plate of fruit, a breezy novel, and, yes, my MacBook.
I shrugged and said, “Sometimes the Net-a-Porter preview window is a little too small on my phone.”
A casual lie. The kind that would make Beau laugh. He loved the idea of me running up charges on his black card, procuring a new wardrobe to match our resort-style life.
But the truth was that I spent my free time digging far too deep into the Redwood breach on my laptop.
A month after the first headline came screaming into view, the fallout was still everywhere. Gossip, lawsuits, and think pieces on the cost of centralizing security data spread like dandelion seeds, impossible to contain once they caught the wind.
Simon tried throwing money at the damage—charging James and a crisis PR firm to stem Redwood’s nosedive in public opinion while an army of lawyers tried to stop the bleeding as former customers banded together in a class-action lawsuit.
James was uncharacteristically deft in his work, finally shedding light on why Simon had kept him around all this time. He lined up interviews, fed reporters a decoy villain in the form of “a disgruntled contract,” and even had every cable chyron echoing his talking points for a little while. But no amount of media triage could save Simon or Redwood.
Because while the leaked customer data was the start of the hack, the fatal blow to Redwood’s image was the emails. Simon’s emails. Five years of private correspondence spilled out in a tidal wave, signaling Redwood wasn’t the only target for the hack. Simon was, too.
Strategies, planning documents, and emails between him andme became public, each one spiking into his coffin like a rusty nail.
It’s how my number got out to a pool of reporters. Why I had to change it. Why I didn’t give my last name out freely. People couldn’t stop talking about every little detail of the hack, and their questions served as fresh reminders of my humiliating termination. I wanted to get as far away from that version of me as possible.
The silver lining was I could dissect the email trove. It felt like I had been handed a postmortem on my own termination. I knewwhenSimon had turned on me—he barely looked at me after that last meeting with Beau.
But one question haunted me in the quiet moments of my day—of which there were now plenty—and that was:Why?
