Free The Start-Up by Sadie Hayes

and give you a head start to tell your father and be a heroic son, or at least a powerful one. As much fun as it is to have me wrapped around your finger, I bet having Ted on your leash would suit you even more.”
    T. J. considered this carefully. As annoying as it was, she was right. He wanted this. He wanted his father to respect him one way or another.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’ll destroy the tapes. There’s only one hard copy. I’ll mail it to you and you can do whatever you want with it. And the digital version is on my laptop in my car. We can erase it after you tell me what you’ve got.”
    Patty’s thin lips spread into a satisfied smile. “Very good,” she said, sticking out her hand to shake on it.
    T. J. thought the handshake a little unnecessary but did it anyway.
    “Okay, spill.”
    “So,” Patty sat up in her chair. “It turns out Gibly is stealing peoples’
    information. Well, not really
stealing
it, but apparently when you download any of the applications onto your phone, it installs a chip that tracks everything you do on your phone, including all the websites you visit and, through your GPS , everywhere you go.”
    “Lots of software tracks where you go. How do you think Google knows what ads to feed you? It drops cookies and follows where you go.
    You’re going to have to do a little better than that, Patty.”
    “Yes, but Google doesn’t keep a database that records everywhere you’ve been and everything you’ve seen, organizing it by the unique ID number on the back of your phone.”
    “Gibly does that?”
    “Yep! Did you seriously take Adam Dory to a strip club after your party?”
    “How did you know that?” T. J. sat forward in his chair. “No way.”
    “And that’s not all. Apparently Lloyd’s has been receiving massive payments from some random bank account for the past year for an unspecified service.”
    “You mean … ” He started to put it together. “There’s no way they’d be selling that information.”
    “Three-point-eight billion says they are,” Patty shot back, pleased with her wit.
    “Patty, this is massive. I mean, that’s a huge fucking deal. You better be right about this. How did you find all this out?”
    “Adam Dory was in my room the other day blabbing on about starting a company and told his sister, my roommate, about Gibly, and she hacked into the site and found the database. Then she hacked into Lloyd’s bank accounts and found the secret deposits.”
    “But that’s … how is that possible? It’s maybe the most sophisticated software on the planet. There’s no way some freshman could hack in.”
    “She’s a total nerd. Like,
beyond
nerd. Imagine if a computer and an iPhone had a baby—that’s Amelia.”
    “And she and her brother told you about it?”
    “They thought I was asleep.”
    T. J. laughed. “You little bitch. You’re even more of a troublemaker than I gave you credit for.”
    Patty smiled, knowing this was a compliment.
    “Alright, my dear, let’s go destroy those tapes. Are you in charge of your own trust fund? Might want to call tomorrow and make sure whatever of it is invested in Gibly gets sold, pronto.” Even though Patty didn’t have full access to her trust fund until her thirty-fifth birthday, Patty had assumed investment decision rights on her eighteenth birthday. Since she knew nothing about investing, she just signed whatever her father sent her and let him handle it. She made a mental note to go back and check what she’d signed to make sure none of it had gone to Gibly.
    “Thanks, T. J. I actually hadn’t thought of that.”
    “No worries.” He stuck out his hand. “I think we’ll make a good team, you and I.”

Chapter XI
Family Decisions
    W here Patty dressed up on Sundays for three-course family dinners prepared by the live-in cook, the Dorii put on sweat pants and snuck food out of the dining hall for their Sunday movie night tradition.
    They were working through AMC’s list of the top