100% Compatibility novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Sixty-Two
At her own engagement gala Jacqueline's score with Barrett flashes 62 and he dumps her in front of 200 guests, then the screen pairs her with his brother at 100, and Odette takes away her home.
My engagement party had a scoreboard.
It hung over the ballroom of the Farnsworth Match gala, ten feet wide, glowing blue.
Two hundred guests held champagne and looked up at it.
I stood under it in a green dress, with my fiance's grandmother's ring on my hand.
Odette Farnsworth tapped her glass with a fork.
She was my fiance's mother, my boss, and the closest thing I had to a mother of my own.
"Every great couple in this city has been scored in this room," she said.
"Tonight we do it for my son."
The crowd laughed softly.
Barrett squeezed my fingers and grinned at the screen.
I thought it would say ninety.
The firm had never published anything higher than ninety-four.
Our slogan was "No one is perfect. Some are 94," and I had said it to a thousand clients.
The screen spun, flickered and settled.
BARRETT FARNSWORTH + JACQUELINE KEOGH: 62%.
Nobody laughed.
Somebody near the bar said, "Oh, no," in a very small voice.
I looked at Odette.
She had her hand pressed flat against her pearls, and she looked sorry.
Then I looked at Barrett.
He had already let go of my hand.
"Jackie," he said, loud enough to carry.
"I can't build a life on a sixty-two."
I almost laughed.
"You proposed to me eleven months ago," I said.
"I proposed to a feeling," he said.
"The number is the truth, and I owe it to everyone here to follow it."
At the bar, a blond woman in a black sheath dress set down her glass.
Sutton Loring, Barrett's assistant, walked toward us without hurrying.
She slid her hand into his.
She did it in front of two hundred people, and not one of them looked surprised.
That was the moment I understood how long they had been practicing.
My face felt hot, and my hands were steady.
I took off the ring.
I did not throw it, because it was his grandmother's, and she had once taught me to play gin.
I walked to the DJ booth, put the ring in the DJ's palm, and said, "Give it to the next bride."
Someone gasped.
Then, because I was Farnsworth Match's best coach and I knew exactly what to say to a crowd, I said it into the open microphone.
"Barrett's right about one thing."
"Numbers should be followed."
"Odette, let's run mine against the whole room."
Odette's smile stayed where it was.
"Jacqueline, sweetheart, this isn't the moment."
"It's the perfect moment," I said.
"Two hundred people paid to see the machine work."
The room made a low noise, the noise of people who wanted blood and would call it curiosity.
The technician at the laptop looked at Odette.
Odette gave the smallest nod in the world, because refusing would have looked worse.
He tapped a key.
The screen went dark.
Then names began to fall down it in a fast blue column, mine pinned to the top.
KEOGH + GUEST 117: 41%.
KEOGH + GUEST 009: 38%.
KEOGH + GUEST 164: 52%.
I stood there and let them scroll.
It was a good way to be humiliated twice, and I was grateful for the dark.
Then the column stopped.
One line stayed lit in white.
JACQUELINE KEOGH + RONAN FARNSWORTH: 100%.
The room did not make a sound.
It was not ninety-four.
Nothing had ever been a hundred.
Ronan Farnsworth stood against the back wall, where he always stood at these things, with a glass he never drank from.
He was Barrett's older brother, and he had built the engine on that screen from his dead father's notes.
I had said maybe four hundred words to him in seven years.
He looked at the screen.
Then he looked at me, and his face did something I could not read at all.
"Cut it," Odette said, quietly, to the technician.
"Cut the feed."
The screen went black.
Ronan was already moving.
He crossed the whole ballroom, with people stepping out of his way.
He stopped in front of me and held out his arm.
"Take it," he said, low.
"Smile, and let's see what my mother does."
I should have asked him why.
But Barrett was staring at us with his mouth open, and Sutton's hand had gone slack in his.
I took Ronan's arm.
His sleeve was warm, and his arm was like a steel bar.
Odette came down the steps from the stage.
She didn't hurry, and she didn't stop smiling.
She stopped in front of me and kissed my cheek, her pearls cold against my jaw.
"Darling, a glitch is nobody's fault," she murmured.
"But the apartment is on the company lease, and so is your job."
"Both of them are mine by breakfast."
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