Chapter 9: A Meeting at Vale Capital

The invitation had arrived eleven days before the launch, which meant Morgan Vale had sent it before the Chronicle story, before the emergency session, before any of it — and Guinevere had accepted it before any of it too, which was the detail she kept returning to as she drove south on 101 toward Atherton.

She had accepted because the roundtable was real. She had checked. Seven principals from firms she respected — IDEO's current creative lead, the woman who had redesigned the London Tube map, two people from the interaction design faculty at Carnegie Mellon. Morgan Vale's name appeared at the bottom of the invitation as host, which was how it worked when someone underwrote an industry conversation and you were in the industry. Guinevere had been to three events exactly like this in the past four years. She had spoken at one of them.

She had checked because the Chronicle story had run four days after she accepted the invitation, and something in her required the sequence to be clean.