Page 42 of Ideal Life

On its face, it was an upscale hotel, but everyone knew the sleek glass-and-wood building was really a watering hole for the engineers, software programmers, and AI enthusiasts of the Valley looking to network.

Tonight, though, it was home to the Techie Singles Mixer, a dating event for people just like Talia who didn’t want to go to Madera. (Madera—which meant wood—was a restaurant and bar inside another tree-named hotel, Rosewood Sand Hill, and it had a reputation for women on the hunt for wealthy, divorced venture capitalists looking to acquire trophy wife number three or four. That was definitely not Talia’s scene.)

Pushing her Omni 3Ds back up her nose, she walked into the Manzanita & Oak’s interior courtyard, a green, leafy sanctuary with teak chaise longues for relaxing in and a small, burbling waterfall surrounded by orchids growing out of the stone. A jazz quartet played in the far corner under a canopy of palm trees, and servers flitted in and out of the mingling crowd, carrying trays of hors d’oeuvres—mini cones filled with beet tartare, duck spring rolls, and bite-size crab cakes topped with a dollop of crème fraiche and a snip of chive.

A perky woman at a table at the entry greeted Talia. “Are you here for the Techie Singles Mixer?”

“Yes. Talia Morgan.”

The woman checked for her name on her laptop, nodded, and handed over an electronic name tag with Talia’s name preprogrammed onto it. The background changed colors every two seconds.

“You can customize it if you want. Just scan that QR code for instructions.” She pointed to another table just a few feet away, where a cluster of new arrivals were paying no attention to each other and were instead intently focused on tailoring their name tags just so. Talia laughed. It was so typical of her industry that even at an event designed to meet other people, their priority was still the technology.

But hey, Talia was one of them, too, so she shuffled over to the name tag programming table and took a few minutes to get hers the way she wanted it. First impressions mattered, and in a crowd like this, it didn’t say great things about you if you let your name tag remain on the generic default. (Erin had been right that people really, really loved the ability to personalize their accessories.)

After changing her name tag from the obnoxious two-second color cascade to her favorite color, Ideal Life’s particular shade of purple, Talia took a deep breath and plunged into the crowd.

As predicted, the ratio in the Manzanita & Oak’s courtyard was heavily gender-skewed in Talia’s favor. In Silicon Valley, it was estimated that there were 40 percent more single heterosexual men than single women. Before she could even grab a crab cake for herself, Talia was approached by a red-haired man with what could only be described as a very earnest, open face.

“Hey, Talia,” he said, reading her name tag. “I’m Colin. I’m thirty-seven years old, I work in sales for Future Rapidity Software, I have three young boys who are sweet, chaotic hellions, and I’m looking for a career woman who is smart and wants a family but maybe doesn’t have time to start her own and therefore would be interested in my children as a ‘quick start.’ ” He chortled at his joke.

Yes, chortled.

“Oh, um, wow,” Talia said. “That’s… a lot of information.”

Colin shrugged and chortled again. “Well, I find that the introduction part of these events is the most awkward, so why not tear it off like a Band-Aid and get it out of the way?”

Talia chewed on her lip. Even though she already knew Colin wasn’t going to be a match—his kids were probably lovely, but she was not looking to dive straight into the deep end of the pool when it came to having a family—he did have a point about not wasting time at a mixer like this.

Finding the right person was a numbers game, Talia figured. In theory, what you needed to do was go on as many first dates as possible and then cut them off and never do a second date if the first one wasn’t promising. In the past, though, she hadn’t had the luxury of time to run this experiment properly.

But now, with the watch on her wrist, she did. That’s why she’d chosen the mixer—there was a high density of single men in one location, and if she didn’t like one of them, she wouldn’t have to waste time. She could cut it short and rewind and use those minutes on someone else.

“It was really nice to meet you, Colin,” she said.

He wrinkled his brow, confused by the abrupt end of their conversation.

Okay, she could have been smoother, but it was fine. She was about to rewind, and he wouldn’t remember any of this anyway. It will have never happened.

“Good luck with finding a brilliant stepmom for your boys,” she said, and she really did mean it. Then Talia turned the crown on her watch.

In reverse, Colin’s face went from confused to awkward to optimistic, and then he was walking backward away from her, she was un-reaching for the crab cake she never got, and then Talia was again at the edge of the name tag table.

She gave herself a few seconds to find her bearings.

One—the room stopped wobbling as her vision readjusted.

Two—she dismissed Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth, who was tutting over Talia’s brief disorientation and corresponding cortisol spike.

Three—memories of the Tinder murder came back, and Talia decided to take off the glasses for the night. Maybe it was better if she interacted with these dates on her own. Not that there was anything wrong with Ideal Life, but… She stuffed her Omni 3Ds into her purse.

Then she stepped once more into the crowd.

But this time, as Colin approached, Talia turned left and power walked directly to the nearest server.

“Crab cake?” he offered.

“Why, yes, thank you.” She actually took two, just in case she got sidelined again before she could acquire more.