Can't Let You Go

Chapter 44

"Stay away from Emily and I won't have any cause to tell Honey."

"Believe me, I had no plans on ever seeing her again. This meeting was arranged completely by Cheryl. Will you protect Tally?"

He nods and I hold his gaze for a moment longer before I leave the room.

We meet with the other designer late in the afternoon. His business partner brings their own document that already contains all the info I wanted. The next day, Carter and I wait in Uncle Robert's large office to discuss the options with him.

"Can we address the elephant in the room between the two of us before Dad gets here?"

"What elephant?"

"The old posts of a one Ms. Emily Smith. Damn. If I hadn't caught a glimpse of it on your phone, I'd have missed a treat for the eyes for sure."

"Those posts are the problem."

"Problem? Are you not a hot blooded man? She's wearing tight exercise gear or teeny bikinis in most of the shots. In the ones where she's wearing clothes, she looks like she just got fucked and I wish I was the one who'd done the fucking. You can't tell me she doesn't make you hard. Even when she came here in professional attire, she was smokin' hot."

"I can't say she's not beautiful, but if she's raising my blood pressure these days it's from stress not lust."

Carter tilts his head and squints his eyes. "Something about that sentence is not right. I think there's more that you aren't telling me."

Fortunately Uncle returns to his office at that moment. "Okay, let's get this decision settled since the interior design is a major visual of our proposal."

"It's simple, go with the one with the most followers." Carter's answer was predictable.

"Actually, it's not that simple. We have to look at the true numbers, that's why I wanted the extra data." I turn on the LCD screen and connect it to my laptop. "Option 1 Ms. Smith. If we look at her subscriber growth, we'll see it was very slow to start, then had a few years where it grew rapidly and steadily. New subs started to taper off, the numbers actually drop, then they've been stagnant in the last year."

"Ten million is ten million," Carter shrugs.

"Not really. If we look at the time period she achieved the most growth and compare it to her posts, this is what we'll find." I go to a page that has a few of the date-stamped posts when she saw the biggest spikes in followers.

Uncle Robert lets out a low whistle.

"Ms. Smith's popularity is based on these types of posts. Prior to these, she posted beginner yoga poses." Her yoga photos were in a room walled with mirrors. I could see a portrait of Athena Moreno and a bookshelf full of iconic awards in some of the shots, so I'm guessing she did these from Tally's house. "She had a few thousand subs over that time. Growth only happened when she began posting 'fitness model' type photos." These are the scantily clad and sexy photos Carter was drooling over. "The most risque shots correspond to the biggest jumps in follows."

"Sex sells." Carter defends her.

"About two years ago, when Ms. Smith graduated, she changed her content to interior design. Initially her follower count lost about three million and settled around ten million. The stagnation probably indicates that she's losing and gaining followers at an equal rate."

"That's still ten million in her audience."

"Because most people are too lazy to unsubscribe and unfollow. Their feeds are so full that they never see everything anyway. Her most popular post with a fitness related tag was the peak of her followers at thirteen million. That post has seven million views, three million likes, and two thousand comments. Her most popular post with a design related tag has under a million views, two thousand likes, and ninety comments. Those are the ones we need to take into consideration."