One by One - Ruth Ware Page 0,48

least for a moment, there was a flicker of connection.

The second surprise is that it is from Snoop. I never get notifications from Snoop. You only get a notification if you get a new subscriber to your feed, and I never do.

Only… now I have. At some point in the night, someone snooped me. I’m not even sure how, since I wasn’t listening to anything. I had no idea that was possible. Although maybe when the Wi-Fi connected it somehow restarted my stream where I left off, just for a minute?

The realization gives me an odd feeling. There is no way to know who it was—you can only see who is snooping you in real time; once they log off the connection is severed, only the number remains. Then I dismiss the issue from my mind. In all probability it was a bot or a server glitch, or someone mistyping the ID of someone they actually wanted to follow.

* * *

Downstairs the rooms are quiet but considerably warmer, and there’s a pile of what I imagine must be yesterday’s croissants keeping warm by the woodburner in the lobby, and two big thermos flasks sitting on the hearth.

I pick up a croissant and go through to the living room to warm my hands at the fire while I eat it. I assume I am alone. But then something catches my eye and I turn to see Elliot, seated in an armchair, bent over his laptop. The sight surprises me for two reasons—one, his laptop is on and seems to be plugged in. And two, Elliot almost never comes out of his room except for meals. In fact, when I was working at Snoop, he didn’t even leave his office for those. He got whoever was doing work experience to bring him takeout—the same thing every day, black coffee and three Pret cheese-and-bacon croissants. It must have been very inconvenient when they stopped serving croissants all day and moved them to the breakfast menu. I find myself wondering what he did. Changed his lunch? Somehow I can’t imagine that. Maybe he started sending the work experience person out at 10:00 a.m.

I don’t normally talk to Elliot. He is very hard to make conversation with, though perhaps that is not my fault. Eva once told me that he divides women into ones he would like to sleep with and ones who are not of interest to him. I am definitely in the latter category. But now I pluck up my courage.

“Hi, Elliot.”

“Hello, Liz.” He says it flatly, but I know him well enough to know that’s not a measure of his enthusiasm. He greets everyone like that, even Topher, who is probably his favorite human being out of anyone.

“How come your laptop is working?”

“I always carry a battery pack.” He holds it up, a chunky thing the size of a brick that is plugged into the power port of his computer. Of course. How like Elliot to leave nothing to chance.

“But you’ve got no internet, right?”

“No,” he agrees. “But I don’t need it for coding.”

“What are you working on?”

“The geosnoop update.” His normally pale face flushes with excitement a little bit, and he launches off into a long explanation I don’t completely follow about geotracking, ad partners, information storage, GDPR, and the technical challenges of making all those elements work with the law and the existing Snoop interface. I nod along, feigning more interest than I really feel. The only thing I really care about is the fact that he used this technology to find Eva. Somehow that seems unbearably poignant—that her own app may be what leads search and rescue to her body.

“I see,” I say at last, as Elliot grinds to a halt. “It sounds very… exciting.” I try to make my voice sound convincing, but Elliot doesn’t really seem to care. It’s not like he ever shows much expression of his own feelings.

“Now if you don’t mind, I need to work,” he says abruptly, with the directness that is so disconcerting.

“Sorry,” I say. “I thought maybe you came down to chat.”

“I came down because it’s too cold to type in my room,” he says, and then he puts his headphones on, and his fingers begin to clatter across the keyboard once more.

I should be offended. I feel like I ought to be. But I’m not. He may be direct to the point of rudeness, but right now, there is something reassuring about that. With Elliot, there are no secret codes