Page 125 of Due Diligence

I watched as she waited for my response. I wondered what she saw in me. I wondered who she saw.

“Cass, I like you exactly as you are. Iloveyou exactly as you are,” I told her.

The words escaped me before I had time to gauge if this was the right time to say that. But once those words dangled between me and her, I wondered if there ever would have been a right time for Cass and me to fall in love. If we had done this when we were eighteen—if I had asked out the beautiful and downright powerful class president like I had wanted to, I probablywouldn’t have dropped out of Princeton when I was a freshman. If I had waited until after the due diligence process was over, she wouldn’t be standing in front of me now, right when I needed her the most.

And falling in love right now—right at this moment? The timing couldn’t have been worse. She just got fired, and my house of cards was about to topple. So yeah, maybe there would never be a right time for Cass Pierson and me to fall in love.

So fuck it: I wanted to break the rules. I just wanted to love her, right now, and for as long as she would let me.

I loved her with everything I had.

Cass’s lips parted as she let the gravity of my words set in. But she kept her eyes locked on mine and after a few excruciatingly long seconds, she smiled. And it wasn’t one of those perfect, fake smiles she used to give me when we first started working together. No—it was real. It was an imperfect little smirk on the corner of her lips that slowly unfolded into a full grin that reached all the way up to her deep brown eyes. “I love you too.”

It was so much more than just four words. It was pure poetry.

***

We didn’t sleep that night. We didn’t even have sex. Instead, we put onCujo(which Frank didnotappreciate at all) and talked out every scenario for what could happen next.

If I hadn’t already been in love with Cass, I would have fallen madly in love with her that night. Her mind just worked in ways mine never could. She could extrapolate scenarios and think five moves ahead. She could take a single path of actions and track countless branches of possibilities, all without so much as lifting a finger.

And she didn’t have to lift a finger because that was where I came in. She would describe potential plans to handle theramifications, and I would add them to a decision tree I mocked up on my laptop. Within a few hours, we had scripted every next step possible—from me reporting it to the FTC directly, to working with our PR firm to get ahead of it, to even moving off the grid. We also plotted outcomes onto the tree, where we assigned scores based on how I fared with each possibility.

The only positive thing to come out of this experience: She and I made a fucking unstoppable team.

On Thursday morning, Alex finally got the call from Davenport-Ridgeway telling him the deal was off. He called me twenty-two times after that. I ignored every single one. He also sent no less than thirty-two furious text messages to me, which I didn’t answer until that night when he told me he booked a meeting with Lilac and he needed me to be there on Friday morning. My response:Okay.

On Friday morning, I arrived three minutes late for the meeting with Lilac—a first. Little did anyone know, I had forced myself to stand in the lobby of the building where their office was located until I was late—but that was beside the point.

I took a seat at the conference table, where Beverly and Rachel were waiting for me. I hated Beverly and Rachel—and that was saying a lot because I didn’t even hate Alex at that moment. But Beverly and Rachel were the ones who came up with the brilliant idea for that contract of mine. Sometimes, I wondered if they were just agents of chaos, whose sole objective was to trick stupid tech guys like Alex and me into paying them ten thousand dollars a month to ruin our lives.

Alex glared at me while I settled into my seat. Fine. He could glare all he wanted; it didn’t change the fact that whatever was coming to him would be ten times worse than whatever was coming to me.

“How are you?” Rachel asked. She rested one hand on mine and stared at me seriously in a remarkably well-executedimitation of empathy. It wasn’t real though. Rachel didn’t care about me—she made that abundantly clear when she told me it was imperative for me to never drink more than two alcoholic beverages in public—for the survival of Libra and our stock price.

“I feel like shit, Rachel. How are you?” I responded, frowning at her as if to say,Why the fuck would I feel any better than shit?

She widened her eyes at my response, probably hoping for an apology. She wouldn’t get one. “Okay then. Let’s just get started.”

Beverly was either twenty-nine or forty-seven. I frankly had no idea. She had the perky bubbliness and the wardrobe of a twenty-something, but the cunning of someone much older.

She clasped her hands together and rested them on the table. “Well, gentlemen, this is obviously averyupsetting scenario. By the end of the day, I anticipate Davenport-Ridgeway is going to release a statement that the deal is off. Shortly thereafter, there’s going to be a breaking news story about the data sale inThe Vergethat I tried to get a handle on, but couldn’t do it.”

“Who the fuck toldThe Verge?” Alex snapped. He turned to look at me and narrowed his eyes even further—as if he thought I was the one who leaked it.

Honestly, I kind of wished I had.

“The point is,” Beverly went on, “we can try to get ahead of this. So, Rachel has put together a plan…”

“Yes,” Rachel cut in. Rachel was definitely thirty-six. I knew this because one time, she coyly told Alex he should try dating someone experienced, like a thirty-six-year-old, rather than one of the twenty-three-year-olds that he tended to pursue.

Real smooth, Rachel.

She tossed her dark hair over her shoulder and swirled her laptop around. “Here’s a statement we’ve written for Marcus topost on his Twitter account about the data sale, saying that he and Lex are the victims of—”

“I’m not doing that,” I interrupted, cutting into Rachel as she continued to point at whatever bullshit statement she had typed up on her rose gold laptop.

The room fell so quiet I could hear the faint sound of the bubbles popping inside Alex’s can of La Croix. Beverly, Rachel, and Alex glanced at each other several times—like they weren’t sure if I was being serious or not.

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