Page 3 of Due Diligence

I almost laughed at the suggestion, but then I realized he was completely serious. And immediately, I realized I wasso game.

“Deal,” I agreed as I took out my phone and pulled up the Uber app. “Should we request a regular car or an Uber Pool?”

Chapter 2: Marcus

“Marcus—”

“Is she finally here?” I shifted my attention from the calendar I’d pulled up on my laptop to the doorway of my office. Alex Larson had just poked his head through and was watching me with his typical expression of amusement plastered across his face.

“She’s here,” he confirmed, nodding.

“Fucking finally,” I murmured before I took a deep breath.Inhale, exhale, clench fist, unclench. I snapped the top of my laptop closed and craned my neck to look through the window and across the office to the conference room where our guest was waiting.

Let her wait.

She was twenty minutes late. Twenty whole minutes. An entire twenty minutes of time on my calendar I could have used to plow through the hundreds of tasks on my to-do list. Tasks that included but were not limited to: finalizing the changemanagement plan for the acquisition, reviewing the language for the inevitable press release, doing damage control withTechCrunchafter Alex sent out thatidiotic fucking Tweetlast week, and also sending an anniversary gift to my moms.

Inhale, exhale, clench fist, unclench.

When he saw me go through my six-second reset ritual, Alex entered my office and closed the door. He folded his arms and leaned back against it in a relaxed pose he had perfected over the years via countless photoshoots for tech magazines and online write-ups. He used to be more tech bro than Tom Ford, but after our PR overhaul a few years ago that changed. Nowadays, I couldn’t spend a day scrolling through Reddit without seeing some post about how Alex was the hottest CEO in the industry, typically accompanied by a picture of him in a custom suit.

Fucking ridiculous.

“You okay?”

As soon as he asked me that question, I wanted to throw my americano at him and ruin the stupid fleece vest he was wearing over his button-down shirt. Nothing about my demeanor suggested I was okay. In fact, a basic grasp of empathy and an iota of inferential skills would tell anyone I was probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

To be honest, it was some kind of miracle I’d never had a nervous breakdown. I was well primed for it, given everything on my plate—today and over the past ten years. But I had my six-second reset, twenty years of practice talking to a therapist (saved as my one and only favorite contact in my phone)…and a lot of CBD oil.

“Dude, relax,” Alex practically ordered, his eyes traveling over my face. His tone was a mix of disbelief and condescension.Fucker. “We’re about to make five hundred million dollars. You’ve got nothing to be upset about.”

I paused, my jaw just daring to drop. He said this like Davenport-Ridgeway was about to give us a crisp check for five hundred million dollars, and we were just going to hand the company to them—like a Craigslist transaction or something. In reality, this would be an ordeal for the ages. This hadbeenan ordeal for the ages, one I had regularly lost sleep over for the last year.

His flippancy was infuriating and frustrating all at once—typical Alex Larson. Having worked with Alex since we were eighteen years old, I probably should have been used to it. It still baffled me though. Ten years. Ten long, chaotic years. If he still needed me to explain how our finances worked, I really had to wonder what the hell we had been doing all this time.

Oh yeah. He designed an app a decade ago, and since then I had doneliterally everything else.

“Don’t recite the terms of the deal to me. I know them. Well. But she’s late,” I reminded him, “and we’re not dealing with chump change. This is real money. Life changing amounts of money. Being late for our first meeting doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

He shrugged.Prick.“Shewaslate. Past tense. She’s here now.”

“And?” I rose from my seat and I walked over to the glass wall opposite my desk. From here, I could see all the way over the dozens of open desks in the front room, to the conference room by the door. We called that conference room the fishbowl, because two of its four walls were made of floor to ceiling glass.

Waiting in the fishbowl was a woman who was young, blond, unassuming, andlate. She and I hadn’t met yet, but she was about to become the bane of my existence. I knew it. Already, I could feel a lump rising in my throat at the idea of working with her. There was no way around it though. She was our due diligence analyst from Davenport-Ridgeway, the companywilling to pay us that five hundred million dollars that Alex so flippantly mentioned. And if we wanted that money—that life changing amount of money—we had to get through her.

“Dibs,” Alex declared as we observed the analyst.

Perturbed, I shot him a glance. I recognized that skeevy, appraising look on his face—the one women apparently found beguiling. “We’re twenty-eight years old. We can’t call dibs on women.”

“Dibs,” he repeated, grinning as he watched her.

Over in the fishbowl, the analyst smiled at her phone. This meeting was twenty-five minutes off-schedule, and either she didn’t realize it or she didn’t care. I hoped it was the latter. If it was the former and I was supposed to spend the next sixty days working in tandem with a fresh-out-of-college, tied-to-her-phone, trust-fund-inheriting, manic pixie dream girl, I was going to cash out all my shares and go off the grid.

Once again, she giggled at her phone and adjusted her stiff, navy pencil skirt as she crossed one leg over the other. Her posture was impeccable, I had to say. Borderline military. But I knew her type well. I could practically smell her Chanel perfume from over here. She was polished and perfect, decorated from head to toe like a Fabergé egg. And just like a Fabergé egg, that was all she’d be good for: the impression of elegance. Faultlessness. But useless, aside from that. Hollow.

I respired after a few seconds. “You can have her. Not going to fight you on that.”

“Why the hell not?”

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