One by One - Ruth Ware Page 0,126

wasn’t like this. Have I been banned?

“Danny,” I say. Danny is scrolling through Netflix. He speaks, without looking away from the screen.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

“Danny, is your Snoop working?”

“Yeah, why?” he says, and then opens up the app to check. “No, wait, what? I’ve lost all my subscriptions and all my favorites. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Has this ever happened before? Have we been banned?”

“No…” Danny is scrolling through menus. “No, I don’t think so… I mean, there’s nothing they can ban you for. It’s not like Twitter where you can post far-right shit. There’s nothing you can do apart from follow people. I think… I think this did happen before, ages ago, when they were starting up and they didn’t have enough servers. I remember a few days where the whole app just crashed, and it was like this. Just a blank screen. Maybe they’re having server problems their end?”

“Maybe.”

I pull up Google, and type in is snoop down.

Article after article comes up. BREAKING reads the first one. British tech start-up Snoop files for administration.

And another one: Snoop users received a rude shock when they logged into their favorite app today to be met with a blank screen, after the company shut down servers following a declaration of bankruptcy by founder and CEO Topher St. Clair-Bridges.

“Fuck.” I can see from his face and the way he looks up at me that Danny has just made the same search, and is reading the same article—or one just like it. “Fuck, they’ve gone under. Rik was right.”

I let out a long breath, and a tension that I didn’t realize I had been holding rolls off me. It’s not that I’m glad that Snoop has gone bankrupt—far from it. The thought of Inigo, Tiger, Carl, and all the rest of them out of a job, not to mention all the people I never met behind the scenes—that gives me zero pleasure. But it sets my mind at rest over a decision that has been gnawing at the back of my mind for three weeks now. What to do about Eva’s video.

Because that was the one question that we never resolved before the Snoop team left St. Antoine. On the one hand, there was Topher’s strenuous argument that telling the truth would make no one better off, and would damage Snoop beyond repair, and probably cost hundreds of innocent people their jobs.

But on the other hand, that equation was precisely what made keeping the secret so uncomfortable. We were not doing what was right, we were doing what was profitable, a fact that Tiger stressed again and again in the increasingly bitter arguments that repeated themselves the last few nights of their stay in the hotel in St. Antoine.

“Are you telling me,” Topher raged, “that if it weren’t for Snoop you’d put Eva’s family through all that? Would you deliberately add another body to Liz’s account, open all those old wounds that poor man’s family thought they laid to rest years ago, torment Arnaud with something he never needs to know? Is all of that really worth sacrificing for the truth to come out when everyone concerned is already dead?”

“No!” Tiger cried. “But that’s the point, we’re not weighing all that against the truth, we’re weighing Snoop against the truth, that’s what makes this so problematic! Topher, you can’t go through life expecting everyone to sacrifice every principle they have for your company’s vision—it doesn’t work like that. It just makes you sound like an arrogant entitled—”

“Entitled, entitled, fucking entitled!” Topher shouted over her. “I am so bloody sick of that word! It’s become a fucking stick to beat white men with. Do you know what entitled actually means, Tiger? It means you deserve something, that you are legally due it, for whatever reason. Think about that next time you talk about someone being entitled.”

And then he stormed out.

Now, three weeks later, I do think about it. I think about what entitled really means. About the fact that the unknown executive’s family are entitled to know the truth about their son and brother. About the fact that Eva’s innocent baby daughter is entitled to grow up without the shadow of her mother’s actions hanging over her. And I think about the fact that the dead are entitled to be left in peace.

Topher is entitled, and that’s the truth. Entitled in the way that Tiger meant. He has gone through life taking, and taking, and taking, just as Eva did.