Chapter 3 - THE DIGITAL TRUTH
The silver service continued,
but the taste of the roast lamb,
seemed to have turned to ash in Blake’s mouth.
He was staring at his phone,
his thumbs flying across the screen,
as he frantically searched for my name.
I knew what he was doing,
I knew he was looking for the paper trail,
the evidence that his world was still the center of the universe.
My father was still staring at me,
his eyes narrowed in a way,
that suggested he was re-evaluating every memory,
every conversation we had ever had.
“Aethelgard,”
Blake muttered,
his voice barely a whisper,
yet it cut through the room like a knife.
The word was a name,
my company’s name,
a word derived from Old English,
meaning "noble protector."
“Audrey,”
Blake said,
looking up from his phone,
his face pale,
his hand shaking.
“It says here that Aethelgard Systems,
closed a Series C funding round,
last month.”
I took a bite of the baby carrots,
savoring the crunch,
as the room held its collective breath.
“Yes,”
I said,
“we did.”
“It says the valuation was…,”
he trailed off,
unable to say the number,
as if the words themselves would choke him.
My uncle snatched the phone from Blake’s hand,
his eyes widening,
as he read the screen.
“One point eight billion dollars,”
my uncle announced,
his voice booming,
breaking the fragile peace of the dining room.
The clinking of silverware stopped completely,
my aunt dropped her napkin,
and my mother reached for her wine,
but her hand missed the glass.
They looked at me,
not as a niece or a daughter,
but as a phenomenon,
a force of nature they had failed to calculate.
“You own eighty percent of the equity,”
Blake said,
his voice now high and thin,
shorn of all its previous bravado.
“That makes you…,”
he couldn't finish the sentence,
the math was too heavy for him.
“It makes me the owner of a company,
that I worked eighteen hours a day to build,”
I said,
my voice dropping an octave,
taking the command of the room.
“While you were measuring the length of your Ferrari’s hood,
Blake,
I was measuring the integrity of global encryption.”
I looked around the table,
at the faces of the people,
who had spent the last decade,
waiting for me to fail.
“I take the bus,”
I continued,
“because the subway is faster,
and I don't need a car to tell me who I am.”
“I wear these clothes,”
“because they are comfortable for long nights at the server farm.”
“And I wear this watch,”
“because Gerald is a friend,
and he wanted me to have something,
that would never lose its value.”
My father leaned back,
a slow,
strange smile spreading across his face,
a smile of pride,
mixed with a deep,
abiding realization.
He realized that the quiet girl,
May you like
the one who didn't want the designer dresses,
had built an empire in the shadows.
