It was at this point that Katya had a creeping sense of panic and stopped responding. Had Sabrina told Dan about seeing Mack’s dick pics? What had Sabrina said about her? Katya hadn’t yet decided what to do about the photo of Isabel’s phone screen that she’d taken, but she knew that the second she said anything to Dan, he’d want her to write something about it—and she figured that if Sabrina had said anything to Dan, then he would have said something to her. Katya decided that the best way to navigate the situation and buy some time was to try to avoid Dan as much as she could. It had almost killed her, but she’d taken only one smoke break that day, and she made sure to do it when he was in a meeting with Rich and Deanna. But today, he was probably going to want to smoke. And talk.
Katya tried to turn off this line of thinking and pay attention to Rich. The co-founder of TechScene was a media-app prodigy who’d managed to find himself in several right places at several right times even as the wider media world was in various stages of collapse or, as people liked to euphemistically call it, “transition.” At Harvard, he’d started a company that sold online ads via an app, a business bankrolled in part by his dad, the formidable Silicon Valley attorney Chip Watson. He’d moved the company to New York right after college and sold it two years ago for a reported $235 million, taken a year off to backpack around Southeast Asia, and met Deanna Stein, one of the early proponents of the importance of teaching journalists to code, when he got back to New York. Deanna had been fired from BizWorld after clashing with the founder and was trying to launch her own media company, and Rich had the cash. Now Rich was generally the public face of the company, while Deanna was more reserved and more intimidating. As had been related in dozens of articles and blog posts about Rich and his new company, they ended up launching a few months ahead of schedule at SXSW, where they’d broken the biggest news of the conference, that Mack McAllister had just secured six million in funding for his workplace-wellness startup, TakeOff. Breaking that news had in turn led TechScene to attract more funding on top of what Rich had already put into the company, which Rich had strategically leaked to the tech gossip site Valleydirt just as he was trying to recruit journalists to come work for him.
Now it seemed as though Rich spent just as much time on TV and giving speeches as he did at the company. In fact, Katya’s dad had been completely skeptical about TechScene altogether until he saw Rich as a talking head discussing Snapchat’s valuation on CNBC, which was on at all times on the TV in the kitchen in his apartment (the TV in the living room was usually on one of the Russian channels they got via satellite).
As Katya watched Rich—clad in his standard outfit of an untucked button-down, dark jeans, and high-top Nikes—talk, she couldn’t stop thinking about the screenshot that resided in the Photos app on her phone. She hadn’t told anyone, even Victor, about what had happened at Andrew Shepard’s house. She was simultaneously thrilled by her daring and incredibly guilty about what she had done, and since Thursday, she had replayed that moment what felt like hundreds of times in her mind, along with the ways that things could have turned out differently if only one tiny thing had changed. Why had Isabel come over to talk to them? Why had she left her phone on the table? Why, why, why.
But what she always kept coming back to was, if Mack McAllister weren’t a disgusting pig, he never would have sent that text in the first place, and then none of them would be in this position.
Still. She may have been conflicted about what to do about the photo, but she knew she needed to safeguard it, so she had backed up her phone to her laptop when she got home from Andrew’s party, taking care not to let on to Victor that she felt the really urgent need to back up her phone on her computer at that moment. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it but she was sure that she didn’t want to decide right then or, worse, have Victor make the decision for her. There was no way he would be cool with her keeping the photo, let alone writing anything about it. He probably wanted to hit Mack up for funding for whatever his next company was. And that had been their deal: Everything at the dinner was off the record. And this wasn’t just off the record, it was private. It had not even been meant for her eyes. It had been an accident, a fluke.
Katya had also thus far avoided thinking too much about the true ramifications of the photo and what could possibly happen if she did anything about it. There was something about speaking truth to power that had attracted her to the idea of being a journalist in the first place—wasn’t that a journalist’s job? To shed light on the nefarious, seedy underbelly of how the sausages of the world got made? And certainly, the Mack McAllisters of the world were the sausage kings, so secure in their positions that they felt it was within their rights to send pictures of their dicks to their employees. It was her job as a journalist to tell the world what a gross human he was. She had never given much thought to gender politics—she didn’t have time, she told herself, to worry about whether she was or wasn’t getting ahead in life because she was a woman—but for the first time she had the thought that maybe it was her job, as a woman, to expose him.