One by One

by Ruth Ware

  It is Rik who answers for them both.

  “No, we’re fine, thanks.”

  “No problem,” I say. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”

  I begin to stack logs into the fire, and Rik leans closer to Miranda and recommences their conversation as if I’m not there.

  “Did you see the look she gave me when I brought up the shares to Liz? I had to check it hadn’t burned a hole in my shirt.”

  “I know.” Miranda puts her head in her hands. “But, Rik, honestly, what were you thinking? Eva made it crystal clear—”

  “I know, I know—” Rik says. He rubs his hand over his short hair, shaking his head in frustration. “But I was ticked off by Eva acting like she’s the fucking Liz whisperer. I’ve known Liz as long as she has. We got on pretty well before all this blew up.”

  “What did happen?” Miranda says. “It was all before my time, I’ve never understood.”

  “You’ve got to understand, it was all just running on a shoestring in those days. It was a joke, those first six months. None of us were getting paid, not that Elliot gave a shit, I don’t think he’d spend any money at all if Topher didn’t make him. He’s been like that ever since school. But the rest of us did mind. Eva was running through her modeling savings like no tomorrow. Topher had finally pissed his parents off so much they’d cut him off without a penny, and he was sofa surfing with old school friends. I was working days at KPMG and nights at Snoop, and right at the bottom of my overdraft. And Liz was just this secretary who answered an advert online and was happy to work for a shit wage. I mean, even then, she dressed like some kind of sister wife, but she was efficient, and she didn’t make a fuss about working out of a crappy rented office with no air-con in South Norwood.”

  “I didn’t mean that, I meant how did she end up being the one casting—”

  “I’m coming to that. We were about two weeks off launching when we finally ran out of cash. We were just broke—flat broke—not a single avenue left. Credit cards, overdrafts, friends and family—we’d wrung them all dry, and we were about ten grand short of what we needed to keep the lights on. Topher had even sold his Ferrari, but it just wasn’t enough. For about four days it looked like we were going to the wall—we had bills rolling in and contracts we’d signed, and we were getting ‘letters before action’ and bailiff notifications left, right, and center. And then out of nowhere, little Liz pipes up that her grandmother just died and left her ten thousand pounds. And she says she’ll put it into the company. Only she wants security. Not interest—she wants shares in the company, and not just any shares—but voting shares. Well, we left it to the lawyers to argue the split, but the end result was thirty percent shares to Topher, thirty percent to Eva, nineteen to Elliot, nineteen to me, and two percent to Liz.”

  “Two percent?” Miranda says. “Of a company that hadn’t raised any capital and was barely solvent? It doesn’t sound like much security for ten grand.”

  “Some people might agree,” Rik says dryly. “But she’s getting the last laugh. That ten grand will be worth around twelve million if the buyout goes ahead.”

  In my shock, I drop a log. It clatters to the slate hearth, knocking over a little pottery jar that holds firelighters. The jar smashes with a noise that sounds almost absurdly loud, and I catch my breath, ready to apologize, but Rik and Miranda don’t seem to have even noticed, and as I resume stacking the logs more carefully, they are still talking.

  “Holy shit,” Miranda says, and she’s laughing, but in a slightly shocked way, as if this is the first time she’s heard the numbers. “I mean I knew the buyout offer was good but…” She looks like she’s doing sums in her head. “So if Liz is getting twelve, then that makes your share—”

  “You can do the maths,” Rik says, and there’s a grin pulling at the side of his face. “But that’s the point. If the buyout goes ahead. The investors are getting antsy, and I don’t think they’re going to stand for another round of funding. If Topher just keeps on like this and runs us all into the ground—”

  “Yup. Gotcha,” Miranda says, a little bitterly. “Back where we started, in the insolvency courts. But then, surely, it’s a no-brainer for Liz, isn’t it? Okay, Elliot will vote with Topher, we all know that. But if Liz uses her brain and votes with you and Eva, then ka-ching.” She makes a money-rubbing gesture with her fingers.

  “Yeah, it’s just a pity Eva’s such a fucking bitch,” Rik says, half under his breath. “She doesn’t make it easy to do the right thing, sometimes.”

  I’m trying not to eavesdrop, but it’s hard not to overhear what they’re saying, even above the music, and by the time I have finished clearing up the pottery shards, I know more than I ever expected about Eva’s bullying of the junior staff, Topher’s instability, and Snoop’s precarious financial position. It’s almost a relief when they move on to other topics—plans for tomorrow’s skiing, the crap Wi-Fi, Rik’s wife, who seems to be causing him some grief. At some point one of them turns up the volume on the music so that I can no longer hear their words clearly.

  But as I stand, feeling the small of my back complain after the long day of lifting and bending, I do hear the tail end of Miranda’s reply to something Rik said.

  “Well, you’re probably right. But in that case, we’ll just have to make her, won’t we?”

  The words stay with me as I close the door quietly behind me and move out into the lobby, to stare out at the still-falling snow.

  We’ll just have to make her.

  Who are they talking about? Liz? Eva? Or someone else completely, Rik’s wife, maybe?

  On the face of it, there’s nothing remarkable about her words. It’s a phrase you might hear any day of the week. So why does the cool determination in Miranda’s voice stick in my head?

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Snooping XTOPHER

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 0

  It is 11:02 p.m. I am up in my room. I am in bed, in my dressing gown, but I am not asleep. I am snooping Topher. Not because I want to listen to his music, which is always weird experimental club stuff, but because I am trying to work out whether he is all right.

  There is no check-in function on Snoop. As far as location goes, the only way of knowing where people live is if they choose to list their location in the brief paragraph of description attached to each username. Still, some part of me had been hoping that his music choices would give me an insight into his psyche.

  I don’t know what I imagined. Sad guitar solos. An infinite loop of “All by Myself.” What he is actually playing is an endless stream of angry Spanish punk rock. Or it could be Portuguese. It sounds annoyed, but that is as much as I can tell. On the plus side he is listening to something and is therefore presumably alive. Though on reflection, I realize I can’t even be sure of that. There’s nothing to say his phone isn’t just streaming to a frozen ditch. After a few minutes I minimize the app with a sigh.

  The memory of our conversation on the sofa downstairs is still with me, like a hangover. I know what Topher was trying to do. He was trying to guilt-trip me. Trying to remind me of everything I owe him.

  The thought should make me feel angry, and it does, in a way. He is an arrogant public school boy who got lucky with a great idea and, more crucially, a mummy and daddy who were prepared to bankroll him—at least for the first few years. He is everything I’m not. Rich. Entitled. Confident.

  But underneath my anger there are some uncomfortable facts. The fact that he took a chance on a gawky, awkward twentysomething, who no one ever looked at twice. The girl from Crawley, smelling of charity shops and hand-me-downs and desperation—he looked past all that and saw the person inside—the real me, dogged, determined, prepared to give 110 percent.

  Most important, when I offered to put my grandmother’s money into Snoop, he was the one who told me to stick out for shares, not repayment interest. Rik, Eva, they both tried to persuade me against it. They
talked about the uncertainty of the returns—the possibility that Snoop might fold without ever making a profit. But Topher told me that shares would be in my own best interests. And he was right.

  Topher is the reason I’m here today. I still do not know whether I should be grateful to him for that, or blame him. Both, maybe.

  That girl—Erin—told us that the funicular stops at eleven. So if he caught it, he should be here soon. But that is the question. Did he catch it?

  I move restlessly to look out the window, at the snowflakes still whirling down. The forecast was predicting lows of minus twenty tonight. People die in cold like that.

  The knock at the door makes me jump. I tighten the belt on my dressing gown and walk over. My heart is thumping as I turn the lock.

  It is Eva.

  “Liz,” she says. “May I come in?” She has changed out of the white woolen dress she wore at dinner. Now she is wearing stretchy yoga pants that make her legs look extremely long. Her scent trails after her like an oil slick. It is strong and a little sickly. I think it might be Poison.

  “Um… okay,” I say. I feel a little ambushed and resentful. I do not really want her in my room, but I am not sure how I can say that without sounding strange.

  She pushes past me and goes over to the window, where she stands looking out across the valley with her back to me. I notice that my closet door is ajar, showing a rail full of dowdy, unironed clothes and my two cases. The biggest suitcase is sticking out slightly, preventing the door from shutting. I nudge it with my foot and close the gap.

  Eva turns, just as the door clicks shut.

  “Are you okay?” she asks abruptly.

  I am taken aback by the question, unsure what to reply. It is probably just a figure of speech, but still, I am not used to people, least of all Eva, caring what I think. It makes me feel strangely exposed. I cannot think what to say, but it doesn’t matter, Eva is speaking.

  “I wanted to apologize for springing that presentation on everyone, but I was afraid that if I put it on the agenda, Topher would find a way to get his side in first—”

  Oh. She has come to try to persuade me again.

  “Eva, please.” My headache, which had subsided after dinner, starts up again. It throbs in time with my heartbeat. “Please, I don’t want to do this now.”

  “Don’t worry.” She takes my hands in hers. They are cold and strong. “I totally understand. I’d be torn in your shoes too. You feel loyalty to Topher, I get that, I do. We all do. But we both know…”

  She trails off. She does not need to finish.

  And in fact, she does not really need to make her case. The facts make it for her.

  There are twelve million reasons to vote with Eva. She doesn’t need to make it twelve million and one.

  “I know,” I say. It’s a whisper. “Eva I know, it’s just that Topher…”

  Topher, who gave me my first-ever chance, who told me to hold out for the shares in the first place. How can I tell him I am betraying him? What will he do? For the first time, I realize; I am frightened.

  “Liz, you know what you want to do, what you need to do…,” Eva says, and her voice is cajoling, like she is talking to a scared child. “Come on, haven’t I always had your back? Haven’t we always taken care of each other?”

  I remember Rik’s question at dinner tonight, the question that made me push back my chair and leave the room. So, Liz, how are you going to spend your share bonus? It was so brash, so bold, so full of assumptions.

  Eva is more subtle. She knows that the money terrifies me in a way. Because for someone like me, who grew up having to hoard every last penny my dad didn’t spend on the slots, it is an unimaginable sum. Ridiculous. Transformative. Life changing.

  Eva knows that the thing that will persuade me is not the money—but something else. Something much more personal, between her and me; an appeal to the past we share. I was her assistant once too, back in the days when Snoop could only afford one. In a different way, I owe as much to Eva as I do to Topher. More.

  But really, she knows what Rik knows, what Carl knows, what everyone apart from Topher and Elliot seems to accept: that it is not a choice at all.

  There is only one sane answer to the question in front of me. My loyalty to Topher is being weighed against not just twelve million pounds, but against something else entirely—the prospect of a very different life to the one I am used to. In the end, what is at stake is my freedom. Freedom from work, from worry, from watching every step—freedom from this.

  “I know, Eva,” I say. My voice is very low. “I know. It’s just… it’s hard.”

  “I understand,” she says. She presses my hand again. Her fingers are cold against mine, and very insistent in the message her grip is conveying. “And I know it’s hard. I feel that loyalty to Toph too, of course I do. But I can count on you, yes?”

  “Yes,” I say. My voice is almost inaudible, even to myself. “Yes, you can count on me.”

  “Good.” She smiles, her wide, beautiful smile. It is a smile that once beamed out from a thousand billboards and catwalks all across Europe. It is like Thank you, Liz, I know what that means. And you can count on me too. We’ll take care of each other, won’t we?

  I nod, and she gives me a perfunctory hug and leaves the room.

  When she’s gone I open the window to get rid of her scent. I lean out, and I let the anxiety locked inside my chest explode into something huge and almost overwhelming. I imagine the meeting, the vote, me raising my hand in support of the buyout, and the expression on Topher’s face as he registers my betrayal… And then I imagine what will happen if I don’t, and I feel utterly sick.

  Because Eva is right. There is only one choice. I know what I have to do. I just have to find the courage.

  And once I have made up my mind, a strange kind of peace descends on me.

  It will be okay. It will all be okay.

  I shut the window. I climb back into bed and I switch off Snoop. Then I lie, quite still, listening instead to the whisper of the snow falling onto my balcony outside. Obliterating everything.

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Snooping ITSSIOUXSIE

  Snoopers: 5

  Snoopscribers: 7

  When my alarm goes off, I struggle up out of a deep, disturbing dream—a nightmare of digging, digging, digging through hard-packed snow, my hands numb with cold, my muscles shaking, hot blood running down my neck. I know what I’m going to find—and I’m both yearning for it and dreading it. But I wake up before I reach my goal.

  It’s a relief to open my eyes and find myself in my own little room, my phone alarm screeching into the silence, until I grope my way to the snooze button and shut it off. The clock reads 6:01, and I lie there for a minute, blinking, still half asleep, and trying to throw off the uneasy feeling the dream has left.

  Just because it’s a weekend doesn’t mean it’s not an early start. Danny and I swap, so that one of us gets up at six to fire up the coffee machine, get breakfast started, and clear up from the night before, while the other has what passes for a lie-in. Today it’s my turn for the early shift, and I can’t stop yawning as I stumble out of bed and pull on my clothes. Some people find they get insomnia at altitude. Not me. If anything it’s the reverse.

  As I pass Topher’s door I pause, trying to hear if he’s inside. Did he get home okay? I didn’t hear him come in, but I left the front door unlocked, and when I came down at midnight to check, there were wet footprints in the foyer.

  I stand there, holding my breath, when suddenly a huge snore rips through the silence, and I let out a shuddering laugh. Someone is in there at any rate, even if it’s not Topher.

  Downstairs is quiet, last night’s log fire just glowing embers behind the wood burner’s glass door. I open up the vents and stick another log on top of the ashes, and then I begin clearing up the debris of the night before.

  Snoop is no worse than a lot of the other groups that stay
here, but I don’t know why today I feel particularly jaded as I pour thirty-year-old brandy down the sink and pick melted Camembert out of the dining room rug. Someone has been smoking inside too, in defiance of the rules—there is a cigarette butt stubbed out in a dish of Danny’s painstakingly made petits fours. That’s what sets my teeth on edge, I think. I remember him making those miniature Florentines; mixing them, baking them, carefully dipping each one into precisely tempered chocolate, laying them out to set. Treating them like the little masterpieces they were. And now someone has used them as a makeshift ashtray.

  It takes me a while to shake off the cloud of anger, but by 7:00 a.m. my mood has lifted a little. The rooms are clean, the fire is crackling, the oven is on for sausages, and the bircher muesli is standing in a big crystal bowl on the side, along with huge pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and jugs of milk and cream. There is still no noise from above, which means I can afford ten minutes to sit down with a coffee and my phone. Normally I’d be checking the snow forecast, or scrolling through Twitter—but today I find myself opening up Snoop and idly flipping through lists of my favorite artists, figuring out who’s online, who’s listening to what, as I sip my coffee. There are some amazing people on here, proper celebs mixed with people who are just fascinating personalities, and Danny’s right, there’s something incredibly addictive about pressing play on the song they are actually listening to at this precise moment, knowing that you are beat for beat in sync with each other. It’s midnight in NYC and lots of the people I snoop on are playing late-night come-down music, which is not what I’m looking for at this time of day, but then I hit a cool little vein of British celebrities who all seem to be up and listening. Why are they awake six a.m. UK time? Couldn’t they sleep? Maybe they always get up at this time.

  I’m washing up the serving bowls that are too big for the dishwasher, tapping my feet to “Rockaway Beach” by the Ramones, when the sound begins to break up. As I’m digging my phone out of my pocket to check the headphone connection, the song drops out completely. Damn. I stare at the screen. The Wi-Fi is still showing a strong signal, but when I click on the Snoop tab a little pop-up message appears. We can’t get no satisfaction. (Please check your internet connection.)