The town car growled around them as the chauffeur drove Mitchell and Arielle from Pebble Beach Golf Links to the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. The last shining sliver of the sun dipped into the ocean as they drove along the shoreline, leaving the inky sky smeared with stars.
Mitchell paused when Arielle suggested they call Emily. He didn’t let people from his life talk to his sister. It wasn’t wise.
“I’m worried about her becoming attached to you,” he told Arielle. “Emily has more of a tender heart than most people, and I’m not sure whether she understands, really, what we’re doing here.”
That last part was intentionally vague because every other way he could have said it sounded derogatory.
Our fake relationship.
That we’re lying to everyone and maybe ourselves.
That it’s just business.
And Mitchell didn’t like any of those phrases anymore, even though they were all included in the contract that he’d written and had seemed fine at the time.
“Yeah, well, I can sit back while you talk to her,” Arielle said. “You don’t even have to acknowledge that I’m here. But you said that you talk to her most days. She seems really nice, and nice people deserve phone calls.”
Oh, Arielle was tired of talking to him and wanted him to do something else. Okay, fine. “Good point.”
He called his sister.
While the phone rang in his hand, the car glided around a curve, rocking him and Arielle in the back seat.
Emily picked up the call. “Hi, sweetie-poopsie! Are you coming home soon? I miss you, and I wish you would come and visit,” she chortled.
“Hello, sweetness-and-light,” Mitchell said, smiling at the side of Emily’s mouth showing on his phone screen. “How was your day?”
“Fine! I had a swimming lesson in the special division at the Y, and I saw Jonas! It’s always so good to see him. I think he’s going to ask me to be his girlfriend. Maybe even get married.”
“That’s so exciting,” Mitchell said, making a mental note to call his mother and see how she’d handled that news.
“And tomorrow, I have work and then my reading tutor and then social skills group. How is your Match Play app doing?”
“Oh, it’s doing fine. We’re getting lots of downloads.”
“Yes, I know. I downloaded your Match Play app.”
Shock zapped him. “What? Does Mom know?”
“No, silly-willy. Mom would have a cow if she knew I’d downloaded a dating app.”
Mitchell needed to call his mother, and it didn’t help that Arielle was sitting on the other side of the car, supposedly scrolling on her phone that lit her face with light in the darkness but also shaking with silent laughter with her hand clamped over her mouth. “Emily, you need to delete that app right now.”
“But it’s fun! Lots of guys are trying to Match with me so we can play Match Play golf.”
“Emily, put Mom on the phone right now.”
“No, don’t tell Mom. I like Match Play. I like talking to people.”
“I know you do, sweet child of our mutual parents, but you can’t be loose on a dating app, talking to strange men.” When he glanced over, Arielle wasn’t laughing anymore. She was sitting straight up, and her eyelids had pulled back to reveal the white sclera all the way around her warm brown irises.
Yeah, that was the appropriate horrified reaction to his little sister being groomed by random men on a dating app.
On Mitchell’s dating app.
Emily said, “I know it’s business, Mitchell, and we don’t mix business with family. But I’m not mixing business with family. I’m finding new friends. It’s always fun to find new friends.”
“Emily, these men don’t want to be your friend. These men want something entirely different. You must delete that app. I need to talk to Mom right now. Go get Mom. Put her on the phone.”
“I’m going to hang up now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, you rinky-dink pumpernickel.”
Emily hung up on him.
The car interior darkened as his phone screen turned off.
Mitchell grabbed ahold of the car seat so he wouldn’t vault out of the car and sprint all the way back to Stamford, Connecticut. “Dammit. I shouldn’t have told her what it was and the name of it. She’s been on this kick where she wants to help with my business, and,” he gestured at the phone, “obviously, that’s not in the cards.”
“Are you going to call your mom?” Arielle asked him. “Because you should tell your mom.”
“My mother will go ballistic. Let me see if I can figure out an end-run around this.”
Mitchell flipped through his contacts and dialed his phone. “Bobby? This is Mitchell Saltonstall. I apologize for calling on a Sunday night, but I desperately need you to go into the office and delete a particular user account from Match Play. If it wasn’t an emergency, I would’ve waited until tomorrow. I need that account deleted immediately.”
Arielle asked him, “Are you calling Bobby Jones on a weekend? Are you crazy?”
Bobby Jones was the type of coder who didn’t react well to an HR admin asking him to work weekends, but Mitchell was the boss. And male. And that probably made a difference.
Bobby asked Mitchell, “Do you need it done at the office, or do you need it done fast?”
“Fast,” Mitchell told him. “You can delete user accounts from the admin dashboard you use, right?”
Bobby grunted. “I don’t have to go all the way down to the office for that. I can do that from my home computer.”
“Okay, great.” The ramifications of that thought echoed in Mitchell’s head. “Should I be worried that you can delete user accounts from your computer at home?”
“Probably. What’s the name on the account?”
“Emily Saltonstall.” Mitchell rattled off her cell phone number.
A chuckle from the other end of the line. “Your wife running around on you? Hey, aren’t you dating Arielle Carter?”
“Emily isn’t my wife. She’s my little sister. And ban her ISP and phone number.”
Bobby Jones laughed. “Golfers aren’t good enough for your little sister? Oh, I see.”
Dammit, that meant Emily had probably put her picture on her account, which meant all those men who contacted her knew she had Down Syndrome from her photo.
Predators.
Before Mitchell told Bobby to delete the account of every man who had contacted Emily, he asked, “Could you check the guys who contacted her and see if any of them also have Down Syndrome?”
“Eh, well, maybe a couple of them. I don’t think I’m the best person to make that call. I don’t do faces all that well. Two look like they might have Down Syndrome. Not so much with the other fifteen.”
“Fifteen! Goddammit. Delete them all. I want them off my goddamn app. All the neurotypical ones, anyway. You can leave the two guys who look like they might have Trisomy 21.”
“That’s the Down Syndrome, right?”
“Yeah. Email the links for their profiles to me, and I’ll tell you whether they do or not. Suspend their accounts for now. I almost wonder if we should leave her profile up as a trap.” He thought better of it. “No, don’t. Pull it down. I don’t want her even accidentally talking to one of these predators. Delete them all, every damned one of them.”
“Yes, sir. Now you see why you need at least one coder around the Match Play office? Two would be better.”
“Point well taken, Bobby. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Mitchell dropped his phone in his laptop bag. “My little sister is a handful.”
“You should tell your mom about what happened,” Arielle said.
Mitchell shook his head. “My mom has worries enough with Emily. If my mother were a car, I’d say she runs hot. Don’t get me wrong. She’s great. But her revs are always pretty near the red line. I took care of it. It shouldn’t be a problem any longer.”
“She sounded lonely.”
Mitchell shrugged. “Emily doesn’t have time to be lonely.”
Arielle paused like she was collecting her thoughts and then said, “When you called, the first thing she did was ask when you’re coming to see her, and she downloaded Match Play because she wanted to talk to people. She sounds lonely.”
That couldn’t be right. “You heard Em’s schedule. She sees lots of people all the time. My mom has her in every lesson and social group for people with special needs she can find.”
“But lessons and orchestrated groups aren’t friendships. It sounds like she’s trying to make friends. You can be busy and still be lonely.”
“Emily has lots of friends. You heard that she had a social group today. Everyone loves her. Besides, a dating app is the wrong place for that. My mother would shit bricks if she knew that men were contacting Emily for anything, even guys with Down Syndrome. I’m not sure she knows about this Jonas guy at swim lessons. I’ll have to make sure she knows.”
Arielle said, “You know that people use Match Play for more than dating, right?”
Mitchell raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s a dating app. What else can they use it for?”
She flipped her hand, indicating a thing from somewhere else. “From what I’ve heard from the customer service representatives at the office, people use code words if they’re looking to meet actual golf playing partners, and only golf playing partners, rather than romantic interests. Well, among other things.”
“I’m afraid to ask what else,” Mitchell said.
“You don’t have enough categories on the app for what people are looking for, so people took matters into their own hands.”
“We put in safeguards so people wouldn’t be sending pictures of their ‘knobby-headed drivers’ or using offensive language. And we have all the possible pairings, so to speak.”
“Well, you have some of them, like cis-het plus lesbians and gay guys, but not others,” she said. “More like, the poly people saying they’re looking for ‘all the clubs in the bag.’”
“I fear asking about other euphemisms,” Mitchell said.
Arielle nodded. “Dinah Shore Tournament friends. Putting from the rough. Playing the back nine. Lipping out. Sprinklers. Threesomes. Foursomes. Couples play. And then there’s just people who flat out say—”
“Oh my God.”
“—on spikes,” Arielle finished.
Oh, God. It rhymed. “That one didn’t get caught by the vocabulary censors?”
“It’s said with love. And with alternate spellings.”
Mitchell shook his head. “Okay, so, adding more categories sounds like a better option. People might not understand the code words and find themselves in situations they hadn’t expected.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s definitely going on. A guy at the office thought he was just looking for ‘playing partners’ and ended up having to let a very excited couple down easy.”
“Oh, no. If that’s how people are using the app, we need many more categories. It’s never worth fighting your customers.”
Arielle bit her lip and then said, “So while you’re doing that, why don’t you add some categories for your sister or other special-needs groups?”
Ice crawled up Mitchell’s spine, and he shivered. “My mother would leap up to the ceiling, skitter across it, drop down on my head, and kill and eat me if I suggested Emily have an unsupervised app for meeting people. She’s too easy to take advantage of in every way.”
“Not necessarily for dating. For finding actual golf partners and friends. What if you put in a special-needs section and made it a little walled garden so people in there would be safe. If you’re in the special-needs section, you can’t also date in the general population. There’d have to be some special safeguards for admission like concurrent enrollment in a special-needs organization like the March of Dimes.”
Mitchell nodded, staring out the front windshield of the car where the headlights cut cones into the dark, touching the boulders on the sides of the road. “Or The Arc, or Special Olympics. We could definitely coordinate this with Special Olympics. They have golf as a competitive sport. Emily competed in gymnastics when she was younger, but now she’s moving into golf and equestrian.”
“Right, and a place for guardians to sign off, and aides or facilitators to go along. I’ll bet we could do it,” she said, her voice trending up with excitement.
Mitchell stroked the rough five o’clock shadow on his chin, thinking. “The lawyers would have to go over everything, but we could get grants for this. The special-needs section would have to be a separate nonprofit, but the publicity would look good for the main app. This kind of feel-good charity work gets big publicity opportunities like the morning shows and glossy magazine articles. A special-needs version of Match Play could be win-win-win all around.”
“I’ll bet Emily would love it.”
Mitchell nodded. “Yeah, she would. Emily would absolutely love if she had an app to talk to people who were safe or at least watched, and she could make new friends and golf with them without my mom breathing down her neck every minute.”
Arielle smiled at him. “It’s so wholesome.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling back. “It really is.”
“Plus, you know how we’re the faces of Match Play for the advertising?” Arielle asked.
Mitchell shrugged. “The reporters have blown it up more than I thought they would. Quite honestly, I was hoping questions would subside after a few months, and we could let the publicity die a natural death and use professional models in the ads again. I still would have paid out your contract.”
“That’s not what I mean. The special needs walled garden will have to have its own publicity, maybe materials for distribution through Special Olympics and the others. Emily wants to help with your business. She could be in the promo materials. She could be the face of special needs Match Play.”
Mitchell’s eyes and nose stung, and he sniffed. “Emily would love it. It would be amazing for her. Yeah, we should do it just for that, but for other reasons, too. This is a great idea, Arielle.” He turned to her. “It’s brilliant. You’re brilliant.”
She shrugged and flopped her hands around. “It was just obvious. I didn’t do anything.”
“You did. Let’s call her.” He retrieved his phone from his computer bag on the floor of the car.
Mitchell called Emily three times, but she wouldn’t pick up the call. He finally texted her, promising her he wouldn’t tell Mom that she had been on the original version of Match Play.
When she answered, her pale blue eye, which was all that was visible on the screen, was narrowed with suspicion. She might be one of the most beautiful souls on the planet, but she wasn’t stupid. “You promise you won’t tell Mom about the app?”
“I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.” Even though her account was now gone.
“Okay. What do you want, honey-boo-boo-bunny?” She still sounded wary.
“I’m going to make a special version of the Match Play app for people with special needs. We’re going to coordinate it through the Special Olympics or The Arc, so you can be a member and talk to people on the app. And Mom won’t be looking over your shoulder every few seconds.”
More of Emily’s face came into view, a chubby, pale cheek and a fringe of blond hair. “You promise?”
“I promise. It’ll be just for people with special needs like you. And I have a very important question to ask you.”
Emily was holding her phone farther away from her eyes so Mitchell could see most of her face when she asked, “Okay?”
“We’re going to need someone to be an ambassador for the new app and be a model in the advertising, someone with special needs who wants to use it and thinks it’s a good idea. We’d need someone who likes to talk to people. Do you know anyone like that?”
Realization dawned in Emily’s eyes. “I can do it!”
Mitchell let the grin he’d been hiding show on his face. “Are you sure? It might mean that we were mixing business with family, but I think this would be important enough that we could do it this one time.”
“I’d love to help you with your business, sweetie-bear-snuggle-o-rama. Can I?”
“I’d love it if you could do that for me, snookums. It would be such a huge help to me in my business, and I would appreciate it so much.”
Emily squealed so loudly that Mitchell was sure it hurt Arielle’s ears, as well as the chauffeur’s in front, and then they were all laughing about it.
Mitchell leaned over the seat as far as his seatbelt would allow and held the phone out so Emily could see both him and Arielle. He told Emily, “Arielle came up with the idea for the app, and she hoped you would be the ambassador for it, too.”
Emily shrieked with happiness again and started thanking Arielle, and then she turned her face away from the camera and said, “Mom! Mitchell wants me to help him with his business! He’s going to make a special app for people with special needs to meet each other, and he wants me to be a model!”
His phone screen became a blur like a visual representation of a record scratch, and then his mother glared down at him. “What’s going on?”
Mitchell was still holding the phone so that he and Arielle were visible. “Um, hi, Mom. Well, we came up with the idea of an app based on the same code as Match Play, but it would be a way for people with special needs to find friends for golf. We were planning to coordinate it with either The Arc or Special Olympics, or both. It would be a safe way for people with ID and DD to meet each other socially, form friendships, and feel more independent about it.”
Mitchell’s mother, a statuesque blue-eyed blonde with authoritarian cheekbones and a ready smile for people who deserved it, said, “We’ll discuss this privately.”
Mitchell told her, “It will be well done and safe. I’ll explain the details to you later.”
“And when will you explain them?”
“Just as soon as I figure out what they are.”
“And who is this sitting beside you?” his mother asked.
Oh, crap. “May I present Arielle Carter, my business associate who came up with the idea of a safe, independent social app for people with special needs based on the Match Play platform. Arielle, this is my mother, Ms. Iris Saltonstall.”
“Hello, Ms. Saltonstall. It’s nice to meet you,” Arielle said with an unruffled smile. Damn, she was pretty when she did that.
His mother’s face softened with a small smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Arielle. You may call me Iris.”
Mitchell felt his eyebrows crawl up his forehead and clamped them back into place. That was a coup, and Arielle didn’t realize it.
The phone screen flashed white and pink again, and then Emily’s pale blue eye was visible. “When is the app going to be ready? Because it’s already July, and the golfing season is almost over up here in Connecticut.”
The season ran through the end of October even in New England, but Emily was right that they were burning summer golfing weather. That was why Match Play’s launch had been a frenzy to get it out in the early spring.
“Two months,” Mitchell told her, excitement-sweat popping from the pores all over his body. “We’ll have it ready for full release by September. And we’ll have a big party to celebrate the release, and you can cut the ribbon.”
She grinned. “And what are you going to call it?”
He looked over at Arielle, visible in the shine of his phone in the dark car. “How about Special Edition?”
More squeals from Emily.
They hung up, and he smiled over at Arielle.
Arielle grinned back at him and bobbled her head as she looked out the front windshield like she was pleased with herself.
She should be pleased with herself. Mitchell was damn pleased with her.
A relationship had been the furthest thing from his mind when he’d met and kissed Arielle on that harried day at Match Play. Yet, when she’d been in his arms today at Pebble Beach with the wind tossing her hair while she laughed, and when the waves chased them up the beach and she’d been snuggly and soft in his arms under the mild sun while the camera snapped away, the fantasy had seemed more real than he’d supposed.
The weekends when he saw her were his favorite time of the week. He looked forward to it while grinding through business at his Connecticut office. His heart leapt when the photographer or reporters suggested they hug or kiss for the cameras.
When the hotel had made a mistake and only had one room reserved for them, he’d damn near cheered because he didn’t have to drop her off at her room and then walk away, but staying in the same room as her and yet forbidden to touch her had been excruciating.
For long minutes at Pebble Beach that day, Mitchell had believed they had something special together, that they were a couple, that the way she kissed him back with her lips under his meant something, and maybe a future together lay just over the horizon if he would reach for it.
But he was hesitant to reach. Extending himself to feel her in his grasp meant crossing over into a strange land for him, one where he didn’t know the terrain nor the language.
Mitchell wasn’t sure if such a place really existed, because if Arielle wasn’t there with him, it was just a fever dream of a mirage.
Maybe, just maybe, when he hadn’t been looking, his heart had fallen for her.
Maybe she’d just been acting, and he was a sap.
But maybe not.
And yet, if she didn’t feel the same way, Mitchell was in trouble. Carrying on for the cameras for five more long months while enduring unreturned affection would be torture.
But maybe she felt something, too.
Mitchell was at a loss about how to proceed.