He hung up the phone. I slipped it back into my pocket and moved deeper into the store, putting the racks of grains and vegetables between me and the guy that was following me.
My mind kept jolting back and forth between feeling like I was being silly and feeling like I was exactly right. I was a normal person with a normal life, I never had someone follow me before. It was completely bizarre and insane to imagine that a man would be after me, but I knew why at least. It wasn’t exactly me he was after, but Carter and my connection to Carter. There was nothing I could do about it except wait.
Ten minutes later, almost exactly, the door to the store opened. Carter came in, looking around wildly. When he spotted me, he walked over to me quickly and wrapped me in a rough hug.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Alright.” He let me go, glancing around. I followed him out of the store and looked across the street, searching for the man.
He was gone. I lingered next to Carter’s car, searching around, until finally I spotted him up the block. He looked back at me and I could have sworn he smiled.
I got into the car, terrified. Carter pulled out into traffic and we left the man behind.
“What did he look like?” Carter asked.
“Average height. Bald. White. Thin. Had nice clothes on like he was gong to church.”
Carter frowned. “Could have been a reporter.”
“He didn’t have a camera.”
He sighed. “Could have been one of Cox’s guys.”
“Aren’t they the ones watching the mansion?”
“Not anymore. I fired the men Cox brought on and Marty is in the process of finding new ones.”
“Can you trust Marty?”
“Probably not, but he’s all I have right now.”
I nodded, lapsing into silence. The tension between us was thick, and I knew that I had violated some unspoken rule by calling him for help. It was best if we weren’t seen together by anyone, just to be safe, but I didn’t know who else to turn to.
He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even question me, even though claiming that I was being followed probably sounded nuts. He didn’t hesitate to believe everything I was saying, which made me feel good. He took me seriously, which was maybe more than I deserved after everything that had happened.
“Let’s go somewhere to calm down,” he said. “Then I’ll bring you home. Okay?”
“Sure.”
We drove for ten minutes in silence before he pulled off the road. He got out of the car and I followed him down a short path toward the bay. The path ended in a turn-around with a little bench at the end of it overlooking the water. Carter sat down on the bench and I sat down next to him, looking out over the water.
“I used to come here in the early days of Valor,” he said. “When things were crazy. I needed silence to think sometimes.”
“What was that like, being a kid and starting a company?”
“Hard to describe it,” he admitted. “On the one hand, you were the boss, but on the other, you’re still just a kid. People looked at me for advice and guidance but also looked at me like the twenty-year-old I really was. I couldn’t drink but I could order adults twice my age around. It was totally bizarre.”
“You’re still pretty young.”
He nodded. “But I’ve learned a lot in the last fifteen years.”
“The world has changed a lot,” I said.
“It has,” he agreed. “There was so much optimism around the internet back then. People thought it was going to change the world. And it has in a lot of ways, but not as radically as we wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we thought it would make everyone all love and peace and equal. Instead, we got Facebook and Twitter, which is all about being empty and fake. They replaced the real stuff with the fake stuff all to get more advertising dollars. Facebook is just one big advertising platform these days.”
“Everyone knows that. But there’s a lot of good stuff on there, too.”
“Sure. Where there are people, there are good things and bad things. I’m just saying, our expectations have been lowered a lot since I started out.”
“Have your expectations changed?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer right away, staring out over the water. I watched him and felt that strange thing inside of me again, that welling-up of genuine tenderness. I wanted to reach out and touch his face, to tell him that everything was going to be okay, but I didn’t. There was a closeness and a distance still between us that I didn’t exactly understand yet.
“Yes,” he said finally. “My expectations have been lowered in some ways. But in others, they’ve gotten higher. I believe in what my company can do. I believe we can bring meaningful change to the world through the internet still, and it doesn’t need to be just about advertising dollars. I guess I’m still an idealist at heart.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve done a lot already.”
“I want to do more. It’s just hard. Sometimes I feel like I’m two people.”
“What are the two people like?” I asked, fascinated that he was opening up so much.