Page 62 of Due Diligence

She was studying me, eyes on mine. I had noticed that about her; she liked to look at my eyes. She once said they were beautiful, and I hadn’t stopped thinking about that comment ever since.

“I think you’re telling the truth,” she mused. “But I’m having trouble accepting that.”

“Accepting what?”

“That you could possibly have any ill-will towards Libra or Alex,” she finished. “Do you have any idea how much money you’ve made off that app?”

“Are you really asking me my net worth?”

“I already Googled it,” she answered before she raised her glass to me. “Due diligence.”

I finished my beer, chugging more of it faster than I needed to. “So, when you Googled me, did thatVanity Fairarticle come up?”

Cass pursed her lips like she was holding back a laugh, which was a drastically different reaction than most people had when I spoke to them about this infamous scrap of journalese.

“I take it you think it’s funny,” I noted, nodding my chin at her. “What was your favorite part? The part where they insinuatedwe spent part of our Series A funding on blow, or the part where I’m allegedly quoted as saying, ‘Peter Thiel can suck my dick’?”

“Honestly, I was thinking about the part where you allegedly caught two employees having sex in the stairwell and you just high-fived one of them and went about your business.”

“That part was true,” I admitted, which made Cass’s eyes widen.

“Really?”

I nodded. “Yeah, the one I high-fived is Cooper, who’s now our Chief Technology Officer.” I shrugged. “I just thought it was a badass place to sleep with someone.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“Anyway,” I said, shaking my head. I tapped my fingers on my empty glass, forcing some of the residual foam bubbles to pop. “There was a massive blowback when that article was published—blowback from every direction. A few of our funders threatened to cut their investments, and I even had random customers emailing me and calling the office and making death threats. One guy even Tweeted at me and Alex and said we were the worst thing to happen to the tech world since the dot-com bubble burst.”

“That’s kind of funny.”

“Agreed. But at the time it was terrifying because we thought we had just tanked the company. So, we hired this PR firm, Lilac, to try to help us rehabilitate our images. That ended up being a great decision overall, because we got our act together and IPOed and went public three years later.”

“I remembered that,” she said. “Bloomberg Business called you and Alex ‘the comeback kids.’”

I nearly cringed at the memory. “Yeah, that was embarrassing…But anyway, the strategy Lilac came up with was to present me as the reliable one and to let Alex be the eccentric genius. And that kind of made sense, I’ll admit. From day one,Alex was the one with the coding skills and the idea, but he needed someone to get it off the ground. That was me. The one with the business sense to turn a couple of kids into millionaires. So, we just dug into that idea.”

“So, they packaged you up into a paragon of virtue and business savvy and Alex got to keep being…Alex.”

“Exactly. So, while he was doing coke with trust fund babies on yachts in the Mediterranean, I had to arrange for a bunch of influencers to run into me at an animal shelter and post pictures saying how nice I was to them. And when Alex was having threesomes with runway models, I had to go to events with grad students from Columbia who I had literally never met before, but shit like that apparently landed well.”

Always needing to keep my hands busy, I continued to tap my fingertip against my empty beer glass as I thought back on the countless other measures I had to take to get Libra back in a good light. If I hadn’t signed an NDA, I could have written a New York Times bestselling tell-all that would have rocked a lot of people’s worlds—and made me a hell of a lot more money.

“Well, so what?” she asked, frowning as she spoke. “The company is doing fantastic. Nobody cares what you do anymore. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re twenty-eight now.”

“I signed a contract that says I have to follow a specific set of rules for the duration of the contract. Otherwise, I lose a considerable amount of my shares.” I inhaled and exhaled quickly thereafter, knowing no number of six-second resets could ever make me fully comfortable with my reality. “I probably don’t need to tell you this, but most of my wealth is in stock, not liquid assets. So, if I mess up, I’ll lose a lot.”

Cass was still frowning with her lips parted the tiniest bit. “There’s acontract?” she clarified.

I nodded, even though that gesture was far too casual for what we were discussing. “It wasn’t just a PR overhaul, it was a deal with the devil. Our board of directors demanded it.”

“Holy shit,” she murmured, her gaze ticking side to side as she let this revelation sink in. “What’s in the contract?”

“A lot of dos and don’ts. The dos change a lot. I basically have to do whatever Lilac tells me to, whenever they tell me to. The don’ts are pretty stable. No smoking in public. No drinking in excess in public. Anyone I date has to be pre-approved by Lilac. No drugs of any kind, ever. No picking up women for one-night stands—that kind of thing. I’m giving a brief overview, but it’s, like, seven pages of stuff.”

“You can’t be serious.” Her expression was nothing short of horrified as she watched me. She shook her head. “Marcus…really?”

“I don’t think I could make this shit up,” I admitted. “So, that’s that. That’s my life. I’m a tightly managed, money-making robot and Alex is free as a bird.”

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