Page 54 of Due Diligence

In 2018, Fitz received an honorary degree from Princeton University.

Fitz has two rescue pets: a corgi mix named Frank after the entertainer Frank Sinatra and a domestic shorthair cat called Sammy, named after the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. Both pets were adopted from the Animal Care Centers of NYC and Fitz made a $25,000 donation to the shelter on each occasion.

I had researched enough hot celebrity guys to know that if Marcus had a girlfriend, it would have been listed on his Wikipedia page. I was also no stranger to the “Personal Life” section. Sometimes, the only reason I even searched for someone on Wikipedia was to read the “Personal Life” section. Marcus had one of the cleanest, most straightlaced, borderline dull “Personal Life” sections I had ever read.

Most of his Google results were along the same lines. If they weren’t about his net worth and his work at Libra, they were about the fact that he was a bona fide angel put on this earth to shame the rest of us for not living better lives. There was even an article inMen’s Healthabout his morning workout routine, which apparently involved ten minutes of meditation.

It wasn’t until I hit the second page of results that I came across aVanity Fairarticle I read a few years ago. The article was called “If You Give a Kid a Company…” and the tag read,When Lex Larson and Marcus Fitz emerged on the scene, they were hailed as wunderkinds that would turn the fintech industry on its head. Three years and tens of millions of funding dollars later, the chaos at their company Libra is finally starting to surface. And it’s not pretty.

The article went on to track the bedlam taking place at Libra seven or eight years ago. It was chock full of salacious accounts about the two founders (then both underage) allegedly throwing wild parties at the office, engaging in behaviors that would make any HR professional’s stomach churn, and blowing through money faster than a group of suburban dads at Best Buy on Black Friday.

When I first read this article, I was still in college and pure schadenfreude made it one of my favorite pieces of journalism of all time. A sizable section of the article detailed how Marcus once showed up to a staff meeting so hungover that he ordered a thousand dollars’ worth of French fries and chicken tenders from his phone at nine in the morning, forgetting that Libra’s Board Chair would be stopping by. When the Chair walked into the office, he was greeted with mountains of fries and boxes of Franzia. Apparently Marcus had even removed one of the bags of Franzia from the box and was drinking it straight from the spigot while he tried to go over quarterly production targets with the staff. The Chair was so appalled that he walked out of the office. Marcus chased after him—bag of wine still in hand—and tripped, splattered wine all over the office, and ended up on the floor in a puddle of pinot, laughing his ass off. He then apparently proceeded to fall asleep in the puddle of wine, until two staff members sobered up enough to carry him to the couch in his office.

As I reread the article, I wondered if that was the same couch where we sat when Marcus had his hands on my body just a couple of hours ago.

I closed the tab with theVanity Fairarticle and stared up at my ceiling, where a massive crack ran right through the middle of it, fanning out from my overhead light. I traced the shape of the crack, although I had stared at it enough to have every inch of it memorized. It showed up one day a few months ago,no explanation. I spotted it while I was lying on my back, legs spread around this guy I brought home from Shelf Atlas. As I glared at it, all I could think about was whether my landlord would withhold my deposit over it. I was so distracted, I pretended to come so I could just kick this guy out and fixate on the crack without interruption.

Money was the reason I was stuck in my job, which meant money was the reason why Marcus and I couldn’t be together. I hated money. Passionately. I didn’t have the privilege of feeling any other way about it anymore. It was a cruel puzzle—the one thing I needed and the one thing I just couldn’t seem to make enough of. Everything else came easy to me—but not money. It wasn’t easy for most of us, after all.

With a sigh, I flipped open the top of my laptop once more, where my Google search for Marcus remained. There on the sidebar, underneath a picture of him, were twenty-five typed characters I could barely stomach:Net Worth: US$156 million.

***

On Tuesday, Marcus spent most of the morning in meetings with staff, so I had our conference room to myself. His absence was notable; the room felt incomplete without him there. I missed the smell of his coffee and his cologne. I missed the warmth of his body when he sat in the chair next to mine as we worked together on my laptop. Most of all, I missed those fleeting looks he gave me when he thought I wasn’t looking—a reminder that no matter how much either of us tried to fight it, we were hardwired to want each other.

I kept busy by finalizing more of the mandatory checklists and verifying that we had what we needed for the accountants to initiate their portion of the audit. I had accounted for most of the documents, which had been relatively seamless thanks toMarcus’s impeccable record keeping. I did, however, have a few more ledgers to review before I could set the accountants loose.

Around lunchtime, Marcus wrapped up his staff meetings and headed back to the conference room. The sight of him strolling in my direction incited a full-body reaction. It was like every nerve ending in me awoke and was sending anticipatory tingles over my skin. My body seemed to recognize him—Oh that guy? That guy who redefined pleasure for us? Yeah, we fucking worship him.

When he entered the conference room, he nodded his chin at me. “Hey,” he said, his tone casual. “Long time no see.”

“How’s your day going?” I asked, striving to match his tone. I lowered the screen of my laptop to look at him. Today, he was wearing an eggplant-colored cardigan over a white t-shirt, and once again I was struck by the fact that I thought a cardigan looked unbearably attractive for the first time ever.

“So busy,” he muttered. As he fell into his usual seat, he peeled back the wrapper on a Clif bar and took a huge bite. “I completely dropped the ball on setting up performance reviews, so now I’m scrambling to try to get those on the calendar. Of course, my assistant just pretended to forget as well—probably because he doesn’t want to do it…” Marcus trailed off as he turned and looked out the window. “Sorry,” he said as he shook his head. “I’m rambling.”

“No, you’re not. I actually like hearing about how you manage your people.”

He turned his eyes on me and flicked his eyebrows up as he continued to chew. “Really?”

I nodded honestly. “Most founders are hands off when it comes to people ops. They can be disconnected, in my opinion.”

Marcus was nodding vigorously as well. “That’s what I was going for.” He took another bite of his bar. “I didn’t want to lose track of my people. I’m very…” He gestured with his hands as hechewed. “I don’t know. I prefer the one-on-one conversations. I connect with people better that way—way better than I do when I’m leading big staff meetings and things like that.”

“So, did you get those scheduled?”

“Yep. I’m underwater now though.” His tone wavered, like he was remembering just how much he still had left to do today. “Did you finish the ledgers?”

“I did, actually.”

“And how did it go?” he asked. Another bite. “Everything in order?”

An instinct to avoid causing him any distress arose in me—and it was an instinct I had never experienced in the past. I paused before I said, “Probably.”

As soon as I hesitated, Marcus put down his half-eaten Clif bar and sat up straight in his seat. His eyes flickered, on the verge of narrowing. But as usual, he was able to compose himself in just a few seconds. “What the hell doesthatmean?”

“What?”

“‘Probably.’” Marcus canted his head. “What does that mean?”

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