The Marriage Code: A Novel Read online

  “Yeah, I think the adoption was lower than expected, or something, so they wanted to see if an app would be better, since the audience worldwide is moving more toward tablets.”

  “The adoption was low?” Emma almost choked on nothing but the air around her. God help her if he’d just mansplained the data she’d been analyzing for months. “We’ve had great adoption! There are more people using it in the US than any other literacy-software programs.”

  He shrugged at her. “Maybe outside the US it’s not so great. I’m not sure.” He reached for the last vanilla cake doughnut with chocolate frosting. “Doughnuts! Don’t mind if I do.”

  Emma hooked her finger in the corner of the box and boomeranged it behind her, out of his reach. No way was he getting one of their Top Pots. She was still fuming over his comment about low adoption. Who was he, anyway?

  “Hold on a sec. How would you know about this app that is apparently being developed and not us?” She looked at her team, who all wore varying expressions on the shock-and-awe spectrum.

  This traitor-disguised-as-fanboy still had his mouth hanging open, and his eyes studied her with what she thought might be absolute disbelief as he looked from her to the doughnut box. She didn’t really care at this point. All she needed was for this morning to be a salvation from the night before, and this Rishi guy was morphing from pretty boy into giant finger poking her very open, and freshly sore, wound. And he was not getting a doughnut.

  “Look, I was just asked to join your postmortem so I could learn more about your project.” He said the words like they knew each other, like he could explain how her project was being taken away and whisked off into the app world. Well, he didn’t know her, or them, or how much this work meant. Like the fact that it was all she had going for her at the moment.

  “You mean to steal it away from us?” She glanced at her team again in solidarity. They sat silently beside her and Rishi at the table with wide eyes, munching on their breakfast like a herd of cats watching a Ping-Pong match.

  “What?” He laughed uncomfortably. “No. I just want to learn about it. Help with the transition so we keep what’s valuable and discard what needs changing.”

  She’d sacrificed and sweated over this project for so long that to just hand it over to another team, to this guy who didn’t know her or Helix, sounded insane. Emma hopped off the table, and Rishi took a step back.

  She imagined the team’s collective disappointment as they watched the series of intricate literacy games flattened into a tiny screen once Rishi and his team had smooshed it into an app. That all the cool things about it, from the richly detailed story-based characters to the carefully articulated messages they’d developed, would lose what had made them great. How could all that still work when shrunk down to fit a two-by-four-inch screen?

  She’d seen what the app developers had done to her email. And what they’d done to the group-collaboration app she relied on to work with her team. Both were barely usable on her phone, while on her laptop they were the software tools she used the most. What had Rishi said? “Discard what needs changing.” He was going to throw away the precious hours, days, and months the team had spent on Helix to make it the amazing literacy software that it was today.

  She couldn’t let them strip it bare like they’d done everything else.

  She pulled the box around, set it next to her, and analyzed the contents. She plucked out the one Rishi had reached for.

  “You want this doughnut?” she asked, holding it out.

  “Well, yeah, I mean . . .”

  She took a bite of it when his hand was an inch away from grabbing it. “Now you know what it feels like to have someone steal something from you.” When she heard the team’s collective gasp beside her, she hoped they knew that she’d done it for them. For Helix.

  But then the gasp turned to whispers. A snicker. A barely covered-up groan that seeped into her, hitting what must have been some kind of shame organ. What was she doing, swiping doughnuts from people as retaliation? Clearly yesterday’s events were affecting her logic more than she realized.

  Rishi raised his eyebrows at her, an annoyed look on his face. She was acting like a child, but damn if she was going to let another guy make her feel bad about herself or her work today. Especially if work was all she had left.

  But she wouldn’t have anything left if she kept acting this way. She clearly owed him an apology, but at this point she had no idea how to recover from the great doughnut debacle. She grabbed her laptop and scurried to the door. “Meeting’s canceled!” she called out over her shoulder.

  CHAPTER 2

  Emma made a beeline for Maria’s office, hoping she wouldn’t come off as a demented squirrel as she scurried down the hall. She’d put everything she had into her job. And now they were just going to toss her hard work aside? And not even tell her? That couldn’t happen.

  But maybe Maria didn’t know. Maybe this whole thing was ridiculous, and they weren’t moving her beloved project to an app, which would be in a whole different department. Maria had taken Emma with her to lead this project when she took this position; otherwise Emma might not have had the chance. With Helix it felt like she was doing something that mattered, because she was developing software for people who struggled with literacy. And it was cool and fun. If it was being morphed into an app, that couldn’t be good news for her job. Or her team.

  She knocked as she opened Maria’s door and wedged her head in, completely aware that she must look like Jack Nicholson in the poster for The Shining, crazy eyes and all. Maria was on a call and gave her a look.

  She slunk around the corner, pulled the door tight, and waited outside. What was she doing? More importantly, what had she done? Had she actually eaten Rishi’s doughnut? There was no excuse other than her clearly fragile emotional state had taken over. People in their late twenties should have had better coping skills than they did in kindergarten.

  Just because she was having a rough patch in her personal life, and her career, apparently, she didn’t need to lash out at strangers. Even if they were trying to take away her job. Or maybe it was the company’s doing. It probably wasn’t even Rishi’s fault. She’d committed a fatal flaw at work and had then shot the messenger by eating his doughnut. She needed to track him down and apologize once she regained control of her rational disposition. And send her team an explanatory email to reassure them that she wasn’t losing her mind and was just having a personal crisis that she’d allowed to get in the way of logic and reason.

  The door opened, and Maria stood there with raised eyebrows. “Hi, Emma, what’s up?” She walked back to her desk and rocked side to side on her inflatable ball, the poster child for office ergonomics in action. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Maria wasn’t just her boss; she was also her friend. Surely if she knew about the app, she would have told Emma.

  “I have a question for you. Have you heard about the Helix app?”

  Maria took a sip of her coffee oh so casually. Oh thank God, it was all a ruse. Emma’s shoulders relaxed, and her face unfroze from its ready-to-freak-out-at-any-moment stoniness.

  “How did you hear about that? I was told it was on the hush-hush.”

  “What? It’s for real?” This couldn’t be happening. The balloon of hope that had briefly filled her deflated with a wheeze. Maria, her trusted colleague, manager, and friend, had kept this information from her, whereas some stranger from another division had seemed intimately familiar with the project. A groan thumped out of her as her back hit the metal chair.

  “It’s very new, very in the works, so to speak. Nothing’s happened on it yet, but I heard mumblings of it and spoke with the app-division director, Jas, on Thursday. But nothing’s been started on it. Nothing’s been confirmed. And no one is supposed to know about it,” she whispered.

  “I just had a guy show up in my postmortem who mentioned it.”

  “Really?” Maria looked confused.

  “Yeah, his nam
e is Rishi, and he’s from the Bangalore office.” She didn’t add that it had ended . . . not well.

  Maria squinted and nodded, looking toward the ceiling. “Oh, yeah. Actually I met him on Wednesday. But we didn’t talk about the app.” She leaned in toward Emma. “And you’re not really an app developer. We have to focus on you. Get you ready for what’s next.”

  Emma sighed. “I thought Helix 2.0 was next. But it seems like that’s now going to be an app, and all my ideas I was going to pitch for the next phase are useless. I was going to run them by the team today and then talk to you about them. See if we could get some budget for the updates . . .”

  “Budget, hmm?” Maria lowered her voice and leaned in farther across her desk. “I don’t know if technically I should be telling you what I’m about to tell you. So, if I tell you, you can’t say anything.”

  “Promise! Scout’s honor.” Emma held up two crossed fingers and then uncrossed them, unsure what that honor looked like. She’d never actually been in Scouts. “But you can’t say things like that and then not tell me.” She gave Maria a smile of encouragement. At least she was willing to tell her something, since apparently telling Emma important things was not high among her priorities.

  Maybe the company was imploding. Or Maria had some kind of super gossip she wanted to share to make her feel better—she wouldn’t be surprised if salacious, drunken antics resulting from the office beer tap had been caught on camera and released on some web TV show called Nerds Gone Wild.

  Maria looked around her, like she was checking the walls for some forgotten person hiding in the corners who could hear them. “Well, it’s not a hundred percent sure yet, but I think they might be shutting down our desktop division.” She issued the missive and then rolled back on her ball as the news sank into Emma’s psyche.

  Helix as she knew it. Gone. Her job as she knew it. Gone. Her future, a black hole of emptiness.

  The questions rose up in her throat, accompanied by the acid burn of her coffee and maybe bile. “But what about the existing version of Helix? Like, that’s not even going to exist?” She shook her head in disbelief.

  “I think the management of it will be absorbed into the rest of the company. You know, until they have the app version.”

  “Okay . . .” She took a deep breath. “So, what about me? And what about you?” She swallowed, knowing that if the division was closing, then it was probably time to start looking for another job.

  “Emma, don’t worry about me. And I’m not going to let you go anywhere. You’re one of our most valued employees. You’ve done amazing work on this project.”

  She hadn’t realized she’d been so tense, holding all her muscles tight as she waited for her answer. “Okay, that’s good.” She let herself relax and trust Maria. Having a job she loved was great and all, but a life of canned vegetables and playing Russian roulette with rent money was not something she could survive alone. Or again. A paycheck was the most important thing you could have. Her upbringing had taught that well.

  “But it will likely be in another group. Like, one of our business applications—customer-relationship management, office tools, or maybe back into machine learning. Your old group, maybe? Hmm?” She said this like she was trying to reassure a hospital patient of something joyful even as they were confined to a bed with only a tiny window to see the world through. Like, Look, it’s Jell-O. You love lime. And neon green. Mmm, Jell-O.

  “My old group?” Her previous boss had been super political and had made her work long hours just to look good for the VP. And the work was years behind what she was doing now. There had to be something else. She didn’t want to leave the company. She appreciated their dedication to underdogs. How they donated so much of their profits to charity. She didn’t want to build applications for salespeople or companies who just wanted to document their customers’ every move. The business world needed those things and all, but how could she be proud of that kind of work the way she’d been blissfully happy the past few years with Helix?

  “Just an idea.” Maria shrugged. “Everything is moving more to app-focused projects, so . . .”

  The app! A heavenly soundtrack with a glow beaming down from above started playing. She had spearheaded the whole Helix project, the code, everything. No one cared more about Helix’s success. She could lead the app development and still get her updates in, and then she could work on something cool after that. “Maria, what about that app? Why can’t I work on that?”

  “You’re not an app developer.”

  Such a tiny detail. “But I know enough to lead the project. It will be like a stretch project. The app devs can do the code work. Knowing what I know about Helix, I can make sure we roll this app out flawlessly with my new, improved vision. I’ll work my ass off to do it.”

  “Is that really what you want to do? Instead of moving on and working on something else?”

  “Yes, a thousand times yes.” Even as she said the words, she realized it might be a bit much. But it was true.

  Maria raised her eyebrows at Emma. “Okay, if that’s really what you want, I’ll bring it up to our leadership team next time we meet.”

  “Okay, thanks, Maria. You’re the best!” She knew it must have been hard for her too. They’d celebrated when they’d gotten this project, gotten drunk together when the first testing had failed miserably, yelled at each other in frustration when the bugs were overwhelming. She paused at the door. “Hey, regardless of what happens, I want you to know I still hope we’ll work together again. We’re a great team.”

  That got a grin out of her. Emma had been so flustered that she was just noticing how stressed Maria seemed as well. “Thanks, Emma. I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Rishi settled into the sofa in the company housing. Thankfully, the other two guys visiting the Seattle office weren’t home, and he was able to stretch out without anyone flipping through the never-ending TV channels or being subjected to someone’s bad music playing. It was like university all over again.

  The days he’d been in Seattle had raced by, back to back, busier than ever, as he’d run to one meeting and then the next. But he loved it. He loved the cool weather outside, so different from what he was used to. The occasional sound of seagulls squawking near the lake by the office. Saturday and Sunday he’d spent just walking around the city, drifting from one neighborhood to the next. He’d drunk coffee, so much coffee. While the cappuccinos were good, they lacked something that was in South Indian coffee. Something he craved with a swelling at the back of his throat.

  He’d compensated for his alimentary homesickness by sampling from the vendors at the market downtown, watching the fish get flung over people’s heads with expert targeting, and trying a Vietnamese sandwich, Mexican tacos, and American doughnuts. Well, he was pretty sure he was over doughnuts now. The idea of eating one was now soured after his experience with a certain redheaded vexation in the office.

  Not that he would have expected much from someone like Emma. Someone oblivious to the trajectory of the company, unable to sacrifice her own ego for the greater good of the business. No one had said anything after their interaction in the conference room. No Sorry, man or Don’t take it personally. Maybe Emma had created a little brainwashed dominion over the project team in the room, who had all given him that How dare you look as they’d filed past him after she’d marched out the door.

  If he were to move here and take over the app development for Helix, he wondered how many more of these toxic Helix team encounters he’d have to endure. The company was moving toward apps for everything. But he’d seen this behavior before. Some people couldn’t let their egos go.

  He picked up his laptop and called his parents. It was nine in the morning at home, so he knew they should be finishing breakfast. Dosas, idli, sambar, chutney . . .

  He stared at the leftover pizza that awaited him for dinner. At least his mouth could vicariously live through theirs.

  The video screen
came to life with a way-too-intimate, up-close-and-personal view of his dad’s nostrils. “Rishi, can you hear us?” he said too loudly.

  “Yes, Appa. I can also see up your nose.” He’d shown them how to use video calling on their computer before he’d left. He was pleasantly surprised to see that they’d actually turned it on successfully.

  His dad laughed and stepped back to settle on the chair in front of the computer. It was a plastic chair, the kind Rishi had seen on a few people’s balconies as he’d walked around Seattle that weekend. His mother then came into the camera’s view from the dining area and swooped down too close to the camera. “Hi, Rishi!” She waved.

  “Hi, Amma!” He waved back. Rishi looked around at his parents’ sitting room area. They hadn’t needed to sell anything yet, but everything was starting to look a little faded. A little worse for wear. When he’d gone home a few weeks ago before leaving for Seattle, he’d noticed a rip in the fabric of the chair where his dad sat to watch TV. The buckets they’d used for washing had duct tape on them to seal up the cracks, and even the plastic wrap covering the posters of gods they had perched around the living room had rips in it, dust gathering at the corners and clouding the tops. It was these little things that Rishi noticed. Things that were a constant reminder of what had happened.

  “How is the US? Is it cold?” his father asked.

  “No, not too cold.” Although if his parents were visiting here, they’d be wearing woolen hats, scarves, and jackets everywhere they went. “It’s spring, so it’s warming up.”

  “Are you eating?” His mom’s brow was lined with worry, the chief concern of mothers everywhere. “Rice? You can find rice and vegetables and dal?”

  “Yes, of course.” He tried not to laugh. Rice and vegetables and dal were all she knew. His mother rarely ate outside the home. Technically, in their community, you weren’t supposed to eat anything cooked by someone outside your caste, and those restaurants were rare. And even when she did eat out at those places, she complained that the food wasn’t good enough. They put baking soda in the rice, or too much chili in the rasam. It was easier for her to just cook three super-complex meals a day, taking up eight hours in the day with just cooking. Something Rishi would never understand, since he ate takeout for pretty much every meal. And meat. Oh my God, how he loved a good lamb biryani. Cue the drool. He cleared his throat. “How is everything there?”