Page 79 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux

There’s also the hesitant, sporadic line of communication with my mother, who’s holding a job for me whenever I want it. It’s nice to know the option’s there, but I’m pretty sure I won’t take her up on it. She told me I was just like her, back in that boardroom when it all came crashing down. But even if that’s ninety-three percent true, I keep finding more and more of myself in the seven percent: with my dad, with Miller, with all my mistakes.

So much of what I loved about MASH was the part I created with Vera—not the code, but the questions. The survey we built to drill down on what people love, and what that means about them, and how it shapes the trajectory of their lives. My mother made me the kind of person who can write an algorithm, but Vera taught me life doesn’t follow a formula. And that its unpredictability—all its surprises and its sorrows—are what make it worth living at all.

So I am like my mother, in a way. But I know now that there are lots of ways inside me. Maybe I’ll pursue tech, just like she planned. But maybe I’ll study behavioral science—that murky, mysterious world Vera opened up for me, the opposite of the order I found from writing code. It’s like Maren said back in December: I get to decide, in the end.

Dad sold Vera’s house in late winter, to a family with little kids who sled down our street when it snows. He used the money to finally, finally transform Beans on the Lake into the restaurant it was meant to be all along.Mo’s, he named it,because you two did something brave and impossible—which is what opening a restaurant’s always felt like to me.

I don’t feel brave, not always. Sometimes I’m so scared it’s paralyzing, like bare skin on black ice. I’ve spent the last few months acclimating to uncertainty—for a while there, I was so sure my future was all planned out. That I’d graduate, and work for XLR8, and stay in Denver close to Dad. It looked linear, like dots connecting on the map of my life.

Now, who knows. And we aren’t supposed to know—I get that. The not knowing is the pain and the joy and the whole damn thing of it. We were never, ever supposed to know.

Vera said there will be different versions of me, stretching out across the years of my life. I imagine all those Ros like relay-race runners, passing on the baton of myself to the next version, and the next.

She said I’ll become someone I can’t even fathom yet. It’s scary, to think about that. It’s exciting, too.

Whoever she is, I can’t wait to meet her.