Hudson spoke confidently into the wireless mic he took off the podium, his big hand clasped firmly around the handle. “Success, to me, is the only way forward.” He shrugged, but his green eyes flashed, intense. “Success is the way you prove to yourself that you’ve earned every single sacrifice someone else had to make to get you to where you are. Success means nothing if you don’t push yourself every moment to top the previous day’s efforts. It’s the way you say thank you for everything you’ve been given.”

Annika frowned as she chewed the last of her raspberry Danish. For someone who was already close to the top, he sounded … obsessed.

“The whole concept behind Break Up is dope. How’d you come up with the idea?” This one came from a pale, lanky boy, his face bright red.

Hudson’s eyes flickered over to Annika for a second. “Thank you,” he said to the boy, walking a few steps forward. “It was a complicated process. When I thought about the way we date—or don’t date—in most of Western society, I realized there was so much lacking. We don’t communicate. If given the chance, we’d rather run away from our messy feelings. And running away from feelings … well, that just creates more mess. I created Break Up for people who don’t know how to say two simple words—‘it’s over.’” Here, he looked at her again, raising his eyebrows a bit.

Annika raised her eyebrows back and shrugged. Okay, so on the surface, his explanation seemed … reasonable. Maybe even noble, in some sense. But the bottom line was Hudson was hurting people with his app. It was being used by people like Heather’s boyfriend, the woman she’d seen in the parking garage being broken up with. It was brutal.

Her thought process was interrupted by the thunderous applause for Hudson. He set his mic back on the stand and twisted the knob to tighten it before raising a hand and hopping off the stage, right toward her.

Annika straightened her shoulders and surreptitiously brushed Danish crumbs from the corner of her mouth. “I could tell you did your best,” she said, when Hudson was within earshot. “But let me show you how to do it better.” Flashing him June’s trademark southern bless-your-heart-but-not-really-because-I-detest-you smile, she started for the stage.

“I hope you can do it with a laptop that’s woefully low on power,” Hudson said casually, smiling and popping a cream puff into his mouth.

“Wait, what?” Annika spun to look at her laptop at the front of the room. Her charger wasn’t plugged into the wall anymore—it had been replaced with a cell phone cord that was now charging a phone that wasn’t hers. “What the hell? Did you unplug me? How petty can you be?”