The view from Jake’s office was obscene.
That was what his lead engineer, Samir, had said the first time he’d walked in here after they’d taken over the top three floors of the old Fulton Terminal building.
“It’s obscene,” Samir had declared, planting his hands on the floor-to-ceiling glass. “No one should get to look down on the Brooklyn Bridge like this. It’s morally wrong.”
Now, a year later, the bridge arched beneath them in steel grace, cars inching like beetles across it. The East River caught the late-afternoon light, a sheet of hammered metal. On the far side, Manhattan punched at the sky, all teeth and ambition.
Jake stood with his back to it, staring at the boardroom table instead.
“Well?” he asked. “Show me the numbers.”
A dozen faces turned toward the screen at the end of the room. TerraNova’s executive team filled the length of the reclaimed wood table—some in suits, some in jeans and hoodies, most in that in-between uniform of expensive casual that said *I work too much to care what I look like but also this T-shirt cost $120.*
Aisha, head of product, tapped her tablet and brought a slide up. Colored bars and lines bloomed across the screen.
“Beta tests in Atlanta and Toronto are ahead of schedule,” she said. “Deployment errors down twenty percent from the last cycle. Traffic modeling accuracy is within acceptable margin.”
“Define ‘acceptable,’” Jake said.
“Eighty-nine point six percent predictive accuracy across all tested scenarios,” she replied. “We wanted ninety. We’re point-four percent off our target.”
“Point-four is enough to screw someone’s commute,” he said.
A muscle jumped in Aisha’s jaw. “Point-four is also within city standard tolerances for models like this. We’re outperforming every competitor.”
Competitors. He fought the familiar flicker of contempt.
They weren’t competitors. They were scavengers, slapping user-friendly interfaces on top of archaic systems and calling it innovation.
TerraNova had ripped out those systems by the roots.
“We’re not building ‘city standard,’” he said. “We’re building better. Get me to ninety.”
A ripple of tension passed down the table.
Samir cleared his throat. “We can get to ninety-two if we throw more compute at it,” he said. “But that also means more energy use. Data centers don’t run on dreams.”
“We have carbon offsets,” someone else muttered.
“Offsets don’t fix the grid,” Samir shot back. “They just make rich people feel better.”
Jake lifted a hand. The room quieted.
“Budget isn’t the issue,” he said. “We’re not cheaping out on power. But I’d rather we optimize the algorithm than brute force the model with extra servers. Smart, not just strong.”
Samir hesitated, then nodded. “Give us two weeks.”
“You have ten days,” Jake said.
“Ten days?” Aisha frowned. “We’re locked into a December launch with half the first-tier cities. Marketing’s already run the campaigns. We can’t move that.”
He knew. The launch date glowed in the back of his mind like a countdown clock.
Thirty-one days.
Thirty-one days until they pushed TerraNova 3.0 live in nine major metropolitan areas. Thirty-one days until they stopped being the scrappy upstart and became the infrastructure everyone else depended on.
Also thirty-one days until the IPO quiet period lifted and every reporter in the country tried to crawl inside his head.
Though *one* would get a head start.
He pushed that thought aside.
“Then hit ninety in ten days,” he said. “We’re not going to roll out a model that leaves the South Side standing in the cold while downtown hums. If we’re saying we’re building cities that work for everyone, then we mean *everyone*.”
A few people shifted, uncomfortable.
“Jake,” said Max, his CFO, smooth as melted butter. “We’re there. We’re past ‘good enough.’ Another iteration isn’t going to significantly affect user experience. But delaying is going to affect projected revenue for—”
“You and your revenue can wait ten days,” Jake cut in. “Users can’t.”
Max’s jaw tightened briefly.
It wasn’t that Jake didn’t care about revenue. He cared very much. Money had built this building around him, paid for the teams that worked late into the night, for the servers humming in climate-controlled rooms a hundred miles away.
Money had gotten the mayor’s office to finally answer his calls.
But he hadn’t started this to make money.
He’d started it because he was tired of watching people like his mother stand at a bus stop in the freezing rain for forty minutes because some backend system didn’t think their time mattered.
Because at nineteen, he’d watched a girl he loved back away from him in tears and say, *You will never care about anything as much as you care about that laptop.*
She hadn’t been entirely wrong.
“Jake’s right,” Aisha said suddenly, breaking the tension. “We’re not rolling out another half-baked civic tech platform that only fixes rich people’s headaches. That’s the whole point of TerraNova. We don’t do that.”
She met his eyes. He dipped his chin, gratitude a brief warmth in his chest.
“Ten days,” he repeated. “Check in with me in five on progress.”
“Fine,” Samir said, scribbling notes. “But if I’m hiring three more data scientists, I want my pick, not whoever recruiting thinks looks good on a brochure.”
“Done,” Jake said. “Now. Press.”
A groan went up around the table.
“I thought that was why we paid for an entire PR team,” muttered one of the VPs.
“PR manages. We decide what we want to say,” Jake said. “Carla?”
At the far end of the table, Carla sat up straighter. She was in her forties, razor-sharp in a navy blazer, her locs pulled back in a sleek knot.
“We’ve locked the messaging for the launch,” she said, swiping up a different slide. Buzzwords and bullet points popped up. “Resiliency. Equity. Efficiency. We’re doing deep dives with *Wired* and *The Atlantic* the week after launch. *The Journal* wants to focus on the financials, which Max will handle.”
“Joy,” Max muttered.
“And *Metro* got the pre-launch exclusive,” she continued. “Local angle, hometown hero story. They’re small but scrappy, and their editor owes me for a favor from my *Times* days.”
“Hometown hero,” Jake repeated, the words sour on his tongue. “That the angle you pitched?”
“They’ll write whatever they want,” Carla said crisply. “But we can nudge them. It’s better than ‘tech overlord plays god with your commute,’ which, trust me, half of Twitter already believes.”
A few people laughed.
Jake didn’t.
He’d seen the tweets. He read the thinkpieces. The ones that painted him as a savior, and the ones that painted him as the devil.
Neither felt especially accurate at three in the morning when he was staring at code and wondering if he’d accidentally built something too big for anyone to control.
“Hometown hero,” he said again. “You told them they could come here?”
“One profile writer, one photographer,” Carla said. “I put the standard conditions in writing. No family questions, no romantic history, no pre-approved copy.”
“Good,” he said automatically.
He didn’t want to think about glossy magazines calling his mother for comment, shoving cameras into that tiny kitchen, asking his brother if he was proud.
He definitely didn’t want to think about some lifestyle blogger asking him about his “type.”
He had a type.
Brown eyes with questions in them. A mind that didn’t let him off the hook. A mouth that said *no* when the rest of the world was finally starting to say *yes* to him.
Carla cleared her throat. “The writer’s name is Olivia Martinez.”
The air in the room went flat.
Jake’s fingers tightened on the back of the chair in front of him.
“Again?” he said, even though he’d heard her perfectly.
“Olivia Martinez,” Carla repeated, checking her tablet. “She does profiles and city coverage for *Metro*. She’s good. Their editor—”
He tuned her out for a second, blood rushing in his ears.
Olivia.
He hadn’t heard her name spoken out loud in years. Not this Olivia. There were other Olivias: the VP of marketing at a partner firm, a UX designer in the Toronto office.
But this Olivia lived in a particular section of his brain, one he mostly kept padlocked.
South Side Olivia. Brown eyes, bitten nails, hair that wouldn’t stay in a ponytail no matter how many elastics she used. The girl who’d sat on his bed in a crappy off-campus apartment and edited his scholarship essays with ruthless efficiency.
The girl who’d left him standing in the rain with a heart that suddenly felt like a stupid organ for other people.
He forced his shoulders to unlock.
“Does she know?” he asked, voice unnervingly calm to his own ears.
“Know what?” Carla blinked.
“That we…” He stopped. That he what? Knew her? Had once thought about marrying her when he was twenty and naive and stupidly sure that love could survive sleep deprivation and unpaid bills?
“That we grew up in the same neighborhood,” he finished.
Carla relaxed fractionally. “It’s part of why Laura pushed so hard to get the piece. Local angle. You’re their favorite son now.”
He almost laughed. “I doubt that.”
“Well, their most famous one,” Carla amended. “The writer’s good, Jake. She doesn’t do puff pieces. If we handle this right, it works for us. You’re always saying you want people to understand the why, not just the what.”
He did say that.
He’d poured it into every keynote, every white paper, every quietly furious op-ed he’d ghostwritten under other people’s bylines. *The city is not an abstract. It’s my brother missing his bus. My neighbor getting evicted. My mother working an extra shift because someone else’s algorithm didn’t see her hours.*
He wanted that story told right.
He just hadn’t planned on telling it to Olivia.
“You put the personal history clause in the conditions?” he asked.
“Of course,” Carla said. “We can’t control if she digs up old high school teachers, but we can make it very clear your romantic past is off-limits.”
Someone near the middle of the table stage-whispered, “Boring,” and got a sharp elbow from the woman next to him.
Jake let the chatter wash over him.
He could say no. He could tell Carla to pull the plug on *Metro* and offer the exclusive to some other outlet whose writers didn’t know how his voice sounded when he was half asleep and coding at three a.m.
He could avoid sitting across from Olivia in a glass-walled conference room and wondering if she’d changed her perfume. If she still snorted when she laughed.
He’d built a company big enough to quietly muscle a small city paper out of the way. Carla could spin a story about timing or conflicting commitments.
He opened his mouth.
“Keep it,” he said instead. “We do the piece.”
Carla nodded once, efficient. “They’re scheduled for next Thursday at two. You’ll have an hour blocked on your calendar. I’ll send you her clips.”
“I don’t need them,” he said too fast.
Her eyebrow went up. “You don’t want to know how she writes before you sit down with her?”
“I know how she writes,” he said before he could stop himself.
A pause.
Several heads swiveled in his direction.
“How do you know?” asked Max, suspicious. “She written about you before?”
“She went to my high school,” Jake said, keeping his tone level. There was no point pretending this wouldn’t leak through the corporate grapevine in under an hour. “It’s a small neighborhood. You remember people.”
“Mhm,” said Samir, drawling it into three syllables. “*Just* the neighborhood. Nothing else?”
Jake shot him a warning look.
But this was the problem with building a company from scratch with people who’d once split instant ramen with you in a dorm room. They actually *knew* you.
“Guys,” Aisha said quietly. “Can we not turn this into a—”
“Into what?” Max said. “He’s a grown man. He can handle an ex.”
“Who said ex?” Samir added, eyes gleaming with mischief now.
“I did,” Jake said flatly, before anyone else could.
The word tasted old. Like something lost and left in the back of a cupboard.
There was a collective intake of breath.
“Well,” Carla said after a beat, voice turning crisp in that *I will not let your personal drama screw up my media plans* way. “That’s… unfortunate timing. But manageable. We’ll brief you. Stick to the product. Keep it professional. If she tries to steer into the past, you pivot.”
Jake nodded, his jaw working.
He pictured Olivia in some cramped newsroom somewhere, reading the same PR conditions he had.
*Mr. Morrison will not comment on... former romantic partners, including but not limited to any relationship predating TerraNova’s founding.*
He wondered what she’d thought when she read that line.
He wondered if she’d laughed.
“Fine,” he said. “Professional. Product. Got it.”
“Okay.” Carla flipped to the next slide, mercifully moving the room on. “Let’s talk about the *Times* op-ed.”
As discussion shifted to talking points and potential headlines, Jake let his gaze drift, just for a second, to the reflection in the window.
The city glowed behind him, a smear of light against gathering dark.
He’d done this. He’d built something out of nothing but an idea and stubbornness and the kind of hunger you only grew if you’d gone to bed without dinner enough times as a kid.
He’d built it without her.
So why, with a billion-dollar IPO looming and half the country about to ride on his infrastructure, did the thought of an hour in a room with Olivia Martinez make him feel more unsettled than any investor meeting ever had?
***
“And that,” Samir said, slumping into one of the leather chairs in Jake’s office after everyone else had filed out, “is why we don’t mix code and feelings.”
Jake dropped into the chair opposite him, scrubbing a hand over his face.
“You mix code and feelings every time you cry over a regression error,” he said.
“That’s art, not feelings,” Samir said. “Different thing.”
Out in the bullpen beyond the glass wall of his office, TerraNova hummed. Literally—the soft white-noise machines Carla insisted helped with focus—and figuratively, with the energy of a hundred-odd people who believed they were making something that mattered.
Engineers hunched over multiple monitors. Project managers talked in clusters, fingers stabbing at timelines on wall-mounted screens. Someone whooped near the back as a test build deployed without crashing.
Jake had designed this floor himself, for function. No closed offices except his and the legal team’s. The rest—long rows of desks, breakout rooms with whiteboards from floor to ceiling. A kitchen with actual food, not just stale coffee and a bowl of sad bananas.
It looked nothing like the spaces he’d started in: borrowed corners of campus computer labs, the back table at the café where Olivia used to pretend to study while he tapped away on his old laptop.
A memory flickered: the smell of burnt espresso, the scrape of chair legs, Olivia stealing his hoodie because she was always cold and he was always warm.
He shut that down.
“You okay?” Samir asked, for once serious.
“Fine,” Jake lied.
“You do realize the entire leadership team now thinks you’re about to have a highly charged reunion with the one that got away, *while* you’re trying to sell the world on Version 3.0,” Samir said conversationally.
“She didn’t ‘get away,’” Jake said. “She left.”
“Ouch.” Samir winced. “That why you put that blanket ‘no romantic history’ clause in your PR doc? So you don’t have to admit on the record that someone dumped you?”
Jake glared at him. “I put that clause in because I don’t want my personal life to turn into some sideshow. This isn’t about who I’m sleeping with. It’s about public infrastructure.”
“Sure,” Samir said. “But also, the narrative is part of the machine, man. They’re going to tell stories about you whether you like it or not. Might as well make sure they’re interesting.”
“I’m not interested in being interesting,” Jake snapped. “I’m interested in fixing cities.”
“And we love that about you,” Samir said dryly. “But investors like stories too. ‘Poor kid from nowhere builds billion-dollar company and gets the girl’ is very marketable.”
“She’s not ‘the girl’ anymore,” Jake said.
She hadn’t been *the girl* for a long time. He’d dated other people. Briefly. Casually. Women who liked the idea of Jake Morrison, founder; who smiled and nodded through his rants about zoning regulations but glazed over when he got into the details.
None of them had felt like sitting on a fire escape at midnight, legs pressed together for warmth, trading dreams like secrets.
Samir watched his face, then shook his head. “You know what? Deny it all you want. Just don’t pretend this isn’t going to mess with your head a little. You built walls, and she’s walking right through the front door with a notebook.”
“She’s a reporter,” Jake said. “She’ll ask questions. I’ll answer the ones I want. She’ll write her piece. End of story.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Samir said, pushing up out of the chair. “I’m going back to the land of pure logic, where if I fuck up, it’s because of semicolons and not because my heart’s in my throat.”
Jake shook his head.
As the door closed behind Samir, quiet settled over the office. The muted buzz beyond the glass dimmed; someone had turned down the white noise system.
Jake turned his chair toward the window.
The city’s arteries pulsed below. TerraNova’s dashboards were probably open on monitors in three different city agencies right now, little lines of color showing where traffic slowed and air quality dropped. Code he’d written—refined now by a hundred hands smarter and more specialized than his—was quietly adjusting light cycles, rerouting buses, pinging maintenance crews.
He reached for the tablet on his desk and opened one of the internal dashboards.
South Side.
He zoomed in on the map.
Blue and green lines lit up the neighborhood where he’d grown up. Bus routes. Water mains. Heat maps of air pollution. Complaints about streetlights out and potholes deep enough to swallow a tire.
One complaint caught his eye.
*Trash pickup skipped for the third week in a row. 400 block of West 19th Street.*
He knew that block.
He could still picture the dented dumpster behind the building, the way neighborhood kids used to climb up on it to get over the fence and into the empty lot where they’d play soccer until someone yelled at them.
He tapped across, drilling down into the work order system.
TerraNova flagged it: three missed pickups, tickets opened, then closed without resolution. Contractor error.
He thumbed a note into the field.
*Escalate. Send inspection. Dock contractor for noncompliance.*
It was a small thing. One garbage-strewn alley. One forgotten block.
He’d built a company big enough that his board wanted him focused on “macro outcomes,” not individual trash pickups.
But this was why he’d started.
Not just to impress VCs. Not even to one-up the professors who’d told him that dropping out to chase his idea was mathematically more likely to land him back at his mother’s kitchen table than here.
He’d wanted to make sure that his mother’s kitchen table still had a building around it.
He closed the dashboard and opened his email instead.
Subject: **RE: Metro feature prep**
From: Carla.
> Jake— > > Here are the clips from Olivia Martinez. A few I pulled: > > - Profile of the night-shift subway cleaners (got picked up nationally) > - Deep dive into the Kensington rezoning fights > - Feature on the community center you funded last year (she didn’t know the grant was connected to TerraNova at the time) > > She’s good. Fair but sharp. Not a fangirl. > > —C
He hovered over the attachments.
Curiosity itched at his fingers.
He clicked on the community center piece first.
A black-and-white photo of the old brick building filled the top of the screen. Kids playing tag on the cracked sidewalk. A mural mid-restoration on the side wall.
Her byline sat cleanly under the headline. *By Olivia Martinez.*
His chest did something weird.
He scrolled.
Her voice came through immediately. Clear, unsentimental, but with a pulse of something underneath—anger, maybe, or love.
> The South Side Community Center has always done a lot with a little. > > In a neighborhood where after-school programs vanish with each budget cut and the nearest private gym is a 45-minute train ride away (and a universe away in membership fees), the center’s peeling gym floor and donated computers are more than amenities. They’re lifelines. > > “We lost three kids last year,” says Director Marlene Ortiz, eyes steady. “Not lost like they ran away. Lost like funeral homes. We’re not losing any more if I can help it.”
He skimmed, eyes catching on details—peeling paint, kids in hand-me-downs, a coach who stayed late to walk girls home so they didn’t have to cross the park alone.
She hadn’t mentioned TerraNova. She couldn’t have known. The grant had gone through a shell foundation, by design.
He’d watched from a distance as the center fixed its roof, hired another counselor, bought new laptops.
It hadn’t felt like charity. It had felt like balancing an old debt.
At the bottom, her closing paragraph:
> “People like to write about neighborhoods like this as if they’re either war zones or salvation stories,” Ortiz says. “We’re neither. We’re just trying to give our kids a place to exist without having to be tough all the time.” > > Maybe that’s the real miracle here: not that the center got a surprise grant in an era of shrinking public funds, but that a handful of determined adults keep holding the door open for another generation, one unpaid hour at a time.
He swallowed.
She’d always had a way of cutting through bullshit.
“Fair but sharp,” Carla had said.
He wondered how fair she’d be with him.
He clicked the subway cleaners piece next. Read about workers whose shifts began when everyone else’s ended, about chemicals that burned skin and lungs, about men who’d lived in the shadows of the system he was now being paid obscene amounts of money to optimize.
Then he clicked the Kensington rezoning story.
Protesters in front of glossy renderings of the “new” neighborhood. Hand-lettered signs. City council meetings that ran past midnight.
Halfway down the article, she wrote:
> “The people making these decisions don’t take the G train at 3 a.m.,” says one resident. “They don’t smell the mold in our hallways. They don’t watch the landlords let things rot until we want to leave, then slap in stainless steel appliances and double the rent.”
He knew that hallway smell too.
He closed the window before he could chase that thought further.
There was a knock on his doorframe.
“Yeah?” he called, without turning.
“It’s five,” came Aisha’s voice. “You’re going to be late.”
He blinked, checked the time. She was right.
“Shit.” He pushed to his feet, grabbing his jacket off the back of his chair. “Thanks.”
She watched him for a second as he shrugged it on.
“You really okay about this?” she asked.
“I’ve survived worse than a profile,” he said.
She didn’t smile.
“This is going to be big,” she said. “The launch, the coverage, all of it. It’s going to put another spotlight on you that’s… brighter than any you’ve had so far.”
“I know,” he said.
“And if you go into that interview with your head half in the past, you’re going to say something you don’t want to see quoted back at you.”
He looked at her.
“I’m not going to fall apart because a reporter I used to know asks me what my favorite coffee is,” he said.
Her mouth twitched. “She’s not going to ask you about coffee.”
“I know.”
He thought about the way Olivia had written about that community center. About kids and cracked floors and miracles that weren’t really miracles.
“She’s going to ask you why you did this,” Aisha said quietly.
He exhaled slowly.
“My story,” he said. “I decide how it goes.”
“Sure,” she said. “Just remember it’s not just your story anymore.”
He knew that. He’d known it the day he took the first check from a venture firm and signed papers that gave away pieces of his company in exchange for the capital to build it.
“This thing belongs to everyone who rides a bus or complains about a pothole now, Jake,” she added. “Don’t let one girl from the old neighborhood fuck that up for you.”
He flinched.
“Noted,” he said dryly.
She squeezed his shoulder once as she passed. “Go. Charm the board. Try not to insult any more billionaires to their faces tonight.”
“No promises,” he muttered.
***
The board dinner was at some downtown spot where the waiters all had ironic mustaches and the wine list was longer than the menu. The kind of place where Jake still felt, on some bone-deep level, like he didn’t quite belong, even in his tailored suit and expensive boots.
He knew how to play the game now. He could talk enterprise contracts and municipal procurement cycles with the best of them. He could drop phrases like “upside potential” and “regulatory headwinds” in just the right tone.
He could even make jokes, sometimes.
But sometimes, at tables like this, when bricks of dry-aged steak showed up on plates that cost more than his mother’s couch, he still saw the cafeteria at his old high school. The choice between the hot lunch and saving the $3.50 for a MetroCard refill.
Halfway through the second course, one of the older board members—a hedge fund guy who always looked vaguely like he smelled something bad—leaned back and speared Jake with a look.
“So,” he said. “This hometown thing. You going to cry on camera about how your parents couldn’t afford a car or something?”
Jake’s grip tightened on his fork.
The woman to his left, an early investor who’d been with TerraNova since they’d been three guys and a dream, shot the hedge fund guy a warning glance.
“It’s not a documentary,” she said. “It’s a newspaper, Ron.”
“Same difference these days,” Ron said, unbothered. “It’s all content. They want a story. Kid from South Side builds an empire. Bootstraps and all that.”
Jake took a slow sip of his water.
“My parents couldn’t afford a lot of things,” he said evenly. “Cars, sure. Decent insulation. Some weeks, electricity.”
Across the table, someone shifted, uncomfortable.
“But the story isn’t that I pulled myself up by my bootstraps,” he continued. “It’s that we built a system where people like me need to be superhuman just to get half the chances other people are born with. If *Metro* wants to talk about that, I’ll give them more than enough quotes.”
Ron made a face. “You start talking like that, you’re going to scare some people.”
“Maybe they should be scared,” Jake said.
A murmur went around the table.
The investor next to him hid a smile behind her wine glass.
Later, in the back of the black car that took him home—not the subway, not anymore, not when every ride turned into someone silently filming him for TikTok—Jake stared out at the city lights smearing past and thought about what Aisha had said.
*It’s not just your story anymore.*
He thought about Olivia, notebook in hand, asking him why he did this.
He thought about what he would say.
Not the polished version. Not the one PR had signed off on.
The real one.
Because whatever else she was, Olivia had never had much patience for bullshit.
And if he sat across from her after ten years and gave her the same canned line he gave everyone else, she’d see through him in a heartbeat.
The car pulled up in front of his building—converted warehouse, exposed brick, windows like boxy eyes.
He stepped out, nodded at the doorman, and took the elevator up to the penthouse.
Inside, the apartment was silent. Expansive. The kind of place you saw in movies when rich characters were supposed to look lonely.
High ceilings. Polished concrete floors. Minimal furniture: a couch, a low coffee table, a massive kitchen island he mostly used to dump his keys and mail on.
He kicked off his boots, loosened his tie.
There was a time when he’d imagined a different version of this.
Same concrete, maybe, same big windows. But with cheap IKEA bookshelves and mismatched mugs. Olivia curled up at one end of the couch, laptop balanced on her knees, typing furiously about something that had pissed her off in the city that day.
He’d come home from some early meeting, drop his bag, steal her pen, and she’d swat at him, eyes flashing.
He’d wanted that.
He’d offered her whatever version of that he could back then. A shitty apartment, ramen, stolen coffee from the campus café, and his absolute belief that someday he’d build something that mattered.
She’d believed in him. Until she didn’t.
He poured himself a drink he didn’t really want and stood at the window, looking out at the river.
Ten years.
He’d thought the fury would fade faster than it had. Fury at her, for leaving. Fury at himself, for giving her so much power in the first place.
It had dimmed, over time, into something cooler. A bruise layered over by scar tissue.
Now, that scar ached.
“Professional,” he said aloud, as if saying it would make it true. “One hour. Product. Cities. That’s it.”
His reflection in the glass didn’t look entirely convinced.
***
Across the river, in a small bedroom where the ceiling sloped inexplicably over only one corner, Olivia lay awake, staring at the faint cracks in the plaster.
Her notebook lay open on her chest, covered in questions.
She’d spent the afternoon walking the old streets, talking to neighbors who remembered Jake—*that smart Morrison boy with the laptop.* She’d sat on the steps of the community center and listened to kids complain about delayed buses and busted WiFi.
She’d written down everything. Names, quotes, little sensory details she knew she’d need later.
Now, in the house where she’d learned to sleep through sirens and shouted arguments, she couldn’t shut her brain off.
Her phone buzzed.
*Raj*: how’s nostalgia land?
*Olivia*: loud. smells like home. also, ma keeps trying to feed me like I’m going on a hunger strike tomorrow.
*Raj*: moms. u get anything good?
*Olivia*: yeah. people have thoughts about his “smart city” fixing their lives.
*Raj*: translation: they hate him?
She thought about the grandmother on the corner who’d said, “If his company can make the bus come when they say it’s going to come, then he can have his name on all the buildings he wants.”
*Olivia*: it’s complicated. I’ll tell you when I’m back.
*Raj*: you gonna be okay talking to him?
She stared at the question.
*Olivia*: ask me Thursday at 3.
She put the phone on her nightstand, flipped the notebook to a clean page, and wrote at the top:
**Why did you really start TerraNova?**
Under it, in smaller letters she immediately wanted to scratch out:
**Do you ever think about that night?**
She clicked the pen closed, shut the notebook, and set it aside.
*Not your job,* she reminded herself. *You’re not here to get closure. You’re here to get a story.*
Sleep, when it came, was shallow and restless, full of trains that never arrived and phones that buzzed with emails she couldn’t quite read.
***
On Monday morning, back at her Brooklyn desk, Olivia slid a twenty-page research memo onto Laura’s desk.
“Light reading,” she said.
Laura flipped through it, eyebrows climbing. “This is… thorough.”
“You asked for thorough.”
“I did. I just didn’t expect Census data broken down by block and decade.” She paged further. “‘Neighborhood sentiment analysis: social media mentions of TerraNova from South Side.’”
“I scraped Twitter,” Olivia said. “Don’t judge me.”
“On the contrary,” Laura murmured. “I’m impressed. ‘Morrison in his own words’?”
“Pulled quotes from his past interviews,” Olivia said. “He repeats some phrases. ‘Systems-level change.’ ‘Equitable access.’ I’m building a bullshit detector.”
“Excellent.” Laura shut the folder. “You ready?”
“No,” Olivia said. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
Laura’s mouth twitched. “That’s the spirit. You’ve got four days. Prep questions, make your outline, and for the love of God, don’t wear that denim jacket.”
“What’s wrong with my denim jacket?”
“You’re interviewing a man whose watch costs more than your college tuition,” Laura said. “You don’t need to cosplay as an Upper East Side publicist, but maybe… something with structure?”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
“Your mom called me over the weekend, actually,” Laura said, deadpan.
Olivia’s heart stuttered. “What?”
“I’m kidding.” Laura smirked. “But from what I’ve heard, she’d probably do a better job negotiating your rate than you do.”
“Rude,” Olivia muttered.
“Accurate,” Laura said. “Go. Do your thing. Bring me back a story that makes me glad I didn’t give this to one of the politics bros who think public transit is something poor people do.”
Back at her desk, Olivia opened a new document.
**Interview Outline – Morrison Profile**
She typed out section headings: *Early life. Education. TerraNova origin story. City impact. Critiques.*
Under *Early life,* she wrote:
- Growing up on West 19th – what did it *feel* like? - First time you realized the system was… broken. - What did you want to be at 16?
Her fingers hovered over the keys.
*What did you think of me at 16?*
She backspaced it away before the words fully formed.
This wasn’t about them.
It never had been.
Or so she told herself.