Page 9 of Her Last Vow

“She’s our VP of Communications. I notified her as soon as you called.”

Rachel nodded, not liking that they’d given any kind of warning that they were coming at all.

The young man led them past a wall of monitors displaying live user statistics scrolling in soft blues and greens. Numbers ticked upward and sideways with no apparent pattern Rachel could follow. A glass-walled café occupied one corner of the ground floor, empty except for two employees hunched over laptops. Behind them, the Apogee logo had been etched into the espresso machine sitting on the long rear counter.

"Does everybody here have a watch on?" Novak asked the young man as they waited for the elevator.

"Everyone. It's part of the onboarding." He said it with the kind of easy pride of someone reciting a company line he genuinely believed. He even showed his own wrist as he said it, showing his own Apogee watch. "We're all supposed to be walking advertisements."

The elevator opened onto the fourth floor, and the receptionist led them down a hallway lined with framed magazine covers, Apogee watches photographed on the wrists of actors and athletes Rachel vaguely recognized. They passed a small glassed-in display case lined with newer, sleeker models.

At the end of the hall, a woman stood waiting outside an open office door, already extending her hand before they'd reached her.

"Nina Oakley," she said. "Pleased to meet you."

She was in her early forties, dressed in a cream blazer that looked tailored rather than bought off a rack. Her handshake was firm, and her smile stayed fixed and professional even as her eyes moved quickly between Rachel and Novak, assessing them.

“Likewise,” Rachel said, offering a smile.

She ushered them into her office, which matched the rest of the building. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the wooded hills behind the campus, and a glass shelf along one wall displayed a timeline of Apogee devices. It started with the bulky first-generation model and stretched all the way to the sleek current version. A single orchid sat on the corner of her desk, and behind her chair hung a framed print of the company's mission statement in a clean sans-serif font: Know Your Body. Trust Your Data. Live Your Peak.

"Please, have a seat." Oakley gestured to a small seating area near the window, two low chairs facing a couch. "Can I get you coffee? Water?"

"We're fine," Rachel said. "Thank you."

They sat, and Oakley settled onto the couch across from them, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. Rachel thought it looked like a rehearsed posture, sort of the way someone would make sure to sit during a job interview.

"So…" Oakley's smile didn't waver. "Can I assume this is about Renata Pike?”

There was no emotion or sympathy to the question, which struck Rachel as heartless. But she had worked with people like this on many occasions—people who never saw humans as worth much of anything if they didn't somehow contribute to the grander picture. And in this case, the grander picture was Apogee.

“It is,” Novak said. “How did you know about that?”

“She’s one of our biggest social media spokespeople. I’ve had at least a dozen people send me her final posting. I did only just hear about her passing about two hours ago, though. I was very sad to hear about it.”

“Did you know about a man named Gerald Mott?” Rachel asked.

Oakley thought about this for a moment before shaking her head. “No, I don’t believe so.”

"We're looking into two deaths connected to your platform," Rachel said, cutting to the chase and, quite frankly, not liking Oakley’s attitude about the entire conversation. "Renata Pike, and a man named Gerald Mott. Both died on the same day their app indicated they'd reached what you call their optimal health peak."

Something flickered behind Oakley's eyes, gone before it could settle into anything readable. "I’d not heard about Mott.”

Probably because he didn’t have hundreds of thousands of followers, Rachel thought, but did not say.

“How long ago did he die?” she asked.

“Several weeks ago.”

"Can you walk us through what ‘optimal health peak’ means?" Novak asked. “What is it, exactly?"

Oakley straightened slightly, and her voice shifted into something more confident, like she'd stepped onto familiar ground. "It's the core of what we built the company around. Most fitness trackers give you a snapshot. Steps today, sleep last night, heart rate right now. What we wanted to build was something predictive, not reactive. Something that could tell a person not just where they are, but where they're headed."

"And how do you predict that?" Rachel asked.

"The algorithm pulls from dozens of biometric inputs continuously." Oakley leaned forward, and her hands moved as she spoke, animated in a way that made Rachel think she genuinely believed in what she was describing. "Resting heart rate variability, VO2 max estimates, updated weekly through a walking test built into the app. Recovery windows after exertion—meaning how fast your body bounces back from strain. Sleep architecture, not just duration but how much time you're spending in deep versus REM. We even track micro-tremors in grip strength every morning, because early neuromuscular decline shows up there before almost anywhere else."

"That's a lot of data," Novak said.