Page 25 of Due Diligence

Instead, I just candidly told Alice about what I was facing: The tenuous $500 million deal on the table. I didn’t try to manipulate her or even try to garner sympathy from her. I just told her the truth: This article could cost me hundreds of millions of dollars if it hit the internet. We ended the call with an agreement that I would be indebted to her for the rest of my life.

Despite this small victory, I left Alex’s office with that constricting feeling still laced throughout my chest. Regardless of the fact that I dove on yet another grenade for Libra and emerged relatively unscathed, it came at a cost. An entire lost day of work. A fight with Alex. The lingering fragments of the digs he took at me. What pained me even more was that he was right: I was probably going to go home, sit by myself with Frank and Sammy, and write in my binder.

As I passed by some of the engineers in the middle of the room, they beckoned me over. There were six of them still at the office, clearly not working anymore, but drinking from the beer tap Alex insisted we install in the kitchen.

Hannah, the youngest person on staff, had a box of donuts on her desk. She was fresh out of MIT and had emailed me personally when she was a freshman and said,I know I can’t come work for you yet, but I just want you to know that I’ll be applying for a job in four years and hope you’ll consider me for a role.

“Want one?” she asked, nodding her chin at the box of donuts.

“You have no idea,” I said as I took a glazed. When I bit into it, I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. That was typical for my workdays; sometimes I got so deep in whatever fire I was extinguishing that I lost track of myself.

“Big plans this weekend?” asked Diego, another one of the engineers who worked on UX design.

I shook my head and leaned against Hannah’s desk, perching there as I ate my donut. “Not really. What about you?”

Diego nodded. “My mom is in town. Think I’m going to take her to see the Statue of Liberty.”

Hearing that, I grimaced. “Why? Do you hate her?”

My question drew out some laughter from the other staff, but I didn’t let it go to my head. They would laugh at pretty much anything I said, not because I was funny but because that was what happened when you became a millionaire before thirty.

“Nah, she’s just never been,” Diego explained. “Hey, can I bring her by on Monday to look around?”

“Fine by me,” I confirmed. I stood. “Listen, you should all go home. It’s Friday. Go have fun and be young.”

“Look who’s talking,” Jesse murmured, which incited more laughs.

Smiling, I brushed it off. “I’ve got some more due diligence stuff I have to do. And you should all appreciate that.”

“We definitely do,” Hannah said as she began to pack up her backpack. “Seriously, Marcus. We’re so excited for this to happen.”

I glanced over at the fishbowl, where Cassie was working at her laptop. I released a sigh as I stared at her, dreading the idea of facing her after the day I’d just endured. “Thanks, guys. Wish me luck.”

When I walked into the fishbowl, she looked up from her screen and nodded at me. “Hey.”

“Hey.” I walked over to my chair, practically fell into it, and released an exhale.

Cassie was watching me over the top of her laptop. She raised an eyebrow and said, “You should go home. We can finish whatever is left for today on Monday.”

Her recommendation surprised me. I was actually expecting her to tell me we needed to work late tonight to stay on track.

“Yeah?”

“I think we both need it.”

I found myself nodding in agreement. Little did she know, she was the first person in weeks to jump over the annoying conversation about whether I was okay—when I obviously wasn’t okay. I was reticent to admit I was grateful for that.

“Did you really finish organizing the legal docs?” I asked as I picked up my laptop to put it in my backpack.

She nodded without looking at me.

“Wow,” I murmured. “Well, that’s good.”

“No big deal,” she assured me, which had to be a lie.

I paused as I took my keys out of the pocket of my backpack, feeling that familiar tinge of uncertainty. I was missing something. Quickly, I ran through my usual morningchoreography before I left my apartment: phone, wallet, keys, laptop, water bottle…binder.

“Where’s my binder?” I asked, frowning as I looked around the conference room. Like an idiot, I even stooped and glanced under the table, despite the fact that it was transparent.