Read Online The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    She was too excited to sleep. She lay on her back in the dark, and her thoughts seemed to fill the room with rustling wings. She thought about her new plan for Alex, the new system she called Verify. She considered her new fortune, the new funds for