Page 22 of Due Diligence

Once I had my mnemonic device in place, the final piece of the puzzle was memory, which wasn’t something I needed to be deliberate about. I just…could. I remembered things. Everything.

When I was growing up, my parents employed a housekeeper from Argentina called Maite, who came to our house four times a week. Sometimes she would bring her son Ramon with her. Ramon was quiet and bookish and therefore fascinating to me as a child. I remembered how he would look around my home with wide brown eyes that would travel over the stacks and stacks of books my father stored in every room of the house. Ramon knew not to touch them, but I could see the hunger in his eyes. Most days, he would sit in the kitchen and do his homework while his mother cleaned our house, his gaze traveling to whatever book he could see from his seat.

It took me years to come to terms with how I witnessed disparity in our lives day after day without batting an eye, but at the time I was grateful for Maite’s presence. Maite and Ramon would speak to each other in Spanish, and within a few months I had picked up the language. Maite thought this was brilliant. When my mother wasn’t around, she would speak to me in Spanish, asking me about my school day and what I was reading. I would chatter on and on, telling her about the stupid things my classmates said and did.

When I was in the fourth grade, Ramon started high school and he came over less and less now that Maite trusted him to stay home by himself. One of the last times he came over, he showed me what he was reading in Spanish class: a story by theArgentine writer Jorge Luis Borges called “Funes el memorioso” or “Funes the Memorious.” We sat at the kitchen table together and he read it aloud to me, even though I could have read it by myself in mere minutes. We liked those moments together though—Ramon reading to me and me listening to him.

The story was about a young man named Ireneo Funes, living in the countryside of Uruguay. After suffering a fall from a horse, Funes develops a supreme memory: he remembers everything—literally everything. He’s capable of recalling distinct details from specific paragraphs on precise pages in books, or of conducting complex number associations in his head. The minutiae overwhelms him. Instead of seeing this as a blessing, Funes suffers from this prodigious gift.

That day when we read Funes, my mother came downstairs, saw me sitting there with Ramon, and this look passed over her face. At the time, it didn’t make much sense to me. Years later, I realized it was a foreshadowing of what would come. When he left under my mother’s ever-watchful eye, Ramon called me Funes and wished me the best. I never saw him again. A few days later, Maite passed along Ramon’s copy of his collection of Borges’s stories, which I would keep on my nightstand wherever I went.To Cassie la memoriosa, it said on the inside cover in Ramon’s pencil scribble.

Within four hours, I was done with Marcus’s little bump in the road. I organized each set of documents into separate stacks, arranged them chronologically, and placed them neatly into the Bankers Box with separators dividing them by year. I used thick binder clips to keep each file together, and even went so far as to put a post-it note with a brief summary of each document on the top.

I emerged from the data room with the brightest smile I could muster and let the door snap closed behind me. All the way across the office—yards away—Marcus was sitting in ourconference room at his laptop. Within seconds, his eyes landed on me. Because I was petty as fuck, I waved at him.

He practically flushed in response, his jaw clenching as I straightened my top. Of course, he didn’t return the wave. Still smiling, I strolled across the office past his bullpen of engineers, imagining I was strutting in slow motion while Beyoncé played in the background.

When I reached the door, I poked my head into the conference room. “Hey, I’m going to get a coffee. Do you want anything?”

He glared back at me, those pale green eyes fixated on me like he wanted to shoot lasers out of them. “You’re taking a break?”

“No, I’m all done,” I corrected, gesturing over my shoulder towards his office, delighting in the way his eyes widened.

Visibly caught off guard, Marcus shook his head. “No way. That’s not possible.”

“I mean, if I had any way to prove it to you, I would.” I cocked my head to the side. “But like you so kindly reminded me earlier, you can’t go into the data room. So, coffee?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped, even though his tone conveyed an opposing sentiment.

“Great. Well, I’ll be back soon.” I gave him a little wave (one I would honestly never offer anyone in sincerity because it was obnoxious as hell) and I strolled out of the office and into a sunny afternoon.

Another round for me.

Chapter 8: Marcus

Cassie departed and I was left staring dumfounded at the front door to the office, where she had just slipped out into the early afternoon with the most self-satisfied look on her face.

What. The. Fuck.

Maybe this was a test. Maybe she wanted to see if I would take advantage of her absence to go into her beloved data room. Thathadto be it. There was just no way she could already be done—no way inhell.

Six-second reset.

I took out my binder and spent a few minutes writing, mostly about being in Cassie’s presence. According to Dr. Jensen, I needed to consider who I was mad at: Cassie ten years ago, or Cassie today. After a few minutes of writing, I came to a conclusion: I was a dickhead and I couldn’t be angry at Cassie for quickly cleaning up a mess I made precisely for her to clean up.

I shot a text over to Dr. Jensen:Revelation: I think I resent her for being as good at this job as she said she was. I think I wanted to see her fail…

He responded:Glad you’re being objective. Looking forward to talking about this soon.

With a flourish, I flipped the lid on my binder and leaned back in my seat, drumming my hands on my stomach. I regretted not asking Cassie for a coffee; I could have gone for one right then.

I was lost in my thoughts for a moment when my inbox pinged on my laptop, reminding me I had more on my plate than thinking about Cassie Pierson. I opened up my email. At the top of my inbox, I saw a new message with the subject line:Going live tomorrow on Forbes.com. As soon as I saw that subject line, my pulse started to quicken.

Over the years, Alice—one of the editors atForbes, the business magazine—had become a close friend of mine. Neither of us really planned for that, but we spent so much time emailing back and forth about Alex and the consistently disastrous interviews he gave, that it was sort of inevitable. Her message read:

Marcus,

I thought I would give you a heads up about what we’re going to run tomorrow. It’s already prepped to go live, so I don’t think there’s anything we can change here….really just sending this along as a courtesy. Hope you’re doing well and let me know if you want to grab a drink sometime soon.

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