Page 120 of Due Diligence

“She has to.”

“Then she’s going to lose her job.” He held up his phone and unlocked it. “See that?”

To say my stomach plummeted would be an understatement. My stomach bottomed out, plunging at top speed through the earth’s mantle. It shot right down into the molten core. On his phone, I saw the grainy still of a video of Cass sitting on my lap in the fishbowl.

He had filmed us last night.

“You can smash my phone and delete the video if you want,” he went on, shrugging. “I’ve got copies saved on different cloud accounts.”

“If I weren’t already facing a felony, I would kill you,” I responded, practically feeling heat blow through my nostrils. To fuck up my life was one thing, but to drag Cass into it was another story.

“Because of her? Wow. The pussy must be—”

“Shut the fuck up. I know you’re baiting me, Alex, but I’m not going to listen to you talk about her like that. So if you were ever my friend, you’ll stop. This crosses a line.”

“Her? She’s your line?”

She was everything.

“Yeah, Alex.”

To my chagrin, he rolled his eyes. “Fine. Here’s what we’re going to do: You’re going to take this to the grave, and you’re going to tell her to do the same. In fact, you’re going to tell her to do everything in her power to make sure none of those auditors find out about those transactions. Otherwise, I’m sending this to everyone I know at Davenport-Ridgeway and every other company I can think of. I don’t think she’ll ever work again.”

The still of the video on the phone screen showed Cass sitting in my lap. My arms held her close to me, while her arms cradled my head against her body. Alex had filmed us from too far away to see anything other than the intimacy of our embrace. I didn’tknow if that made it better or worse. What he missed was the fact that I was crying last night—crying in front of her and crying over the fact that Alex had taken something from me. When I left Libra, I hadn’t planned on leaving rubble and carnage in my wake. I’d planned on walking away from a palace of gold and crystal. Once this was over and done with, there would be nothing but rubble and carnage. Ashes.

Alex canted his head as he watched me. I didn’t know what to say.

“You were the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother,” I finally said. The admission felt noxious. Over the years, I’d had a lot of sorry excuses for brothers—three foster brothers, to be exact. They had relentlessly hurt me, physically or otherwise, but none of them had ever been quite so effective as Alex.

Without another word, I walked over to the door. I lingered there, staring at the doorknob and waiting for him to stop me. I could feel him watching me.

“You’re sure this is what you want?” I managed to say. “This is how you want this to go down?”

When I looked over my shoulder, his blue eyes were sharp. He nodded. “You know what to do,” he stated. “Due diligence ends in a week, right? You better hurry up and talk to your girlfriend.”

Chapter 33: Cass

Jorge Luis Borges had a number.

That number was 1.8 million digits long, represented as approximately 1.9560 times 10 to the 1,834,097th power. The origin of that number was 25 to a power of 410 times 40 times 80. The reason for those numbers was actually pretty straightforward:

25: the number of characters in Borges’s alphabet (22 letters plus a space character, a period, and the comma)

410: the number of pages in every book in the Library of Babel

40: the number of lines per page

80: the number of characters per line

When I was in the fourth grade, we learned exponents in school. My teacher asked us for an example of how exponents existed in real life—her expectation being that one of us would talk about common permutations (There are two main options for Happy Meals—burgers or nuggets—and there are just two options for sides—fries or apple slices—which means there are2 to the second power total options).Naturally, ten-year-old Cass didn’t realize that, and proudly raised her hand to speak about Borges’s number.

My classmates laughed relentlessly. I cried in the classroom. My teacher called my parents and suggested I had ADHD and was speaking nonsense. It turned out she didn’t realize there was an Argentine writer named Jorge Luis Borges who just happened to love writing about math. After that meeting, my parents pulled me out of my school and enrolled me in a gifted academy. That was a colossal joke because nobody there was particularly gifted.

But there were countless occasions after that day when I wondered what would have happened if I had just kept my mouth shut. If I had never raised my hand to talk about Borges’s number, maybe I would have never switched schools and would have never been subjected to the relentless strings of adults’ expectations that tugged at me like I was a marionette.

I started calling those occasions “Borges Moments.” They were occasions when I wished I had just done one thing differently—and maybe everything would have gone better.

Most people called this regret, but most people didn’t have to replay these occasions in stark detail over and over and over again.

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