Page 135 of Masks and Mishaps

I will. I do.

Epilogue Two

ESSIE

Six years later

“Howloudisitgoing to be?” Dalton inquires, and when he doesn’t get an immediate answer, he repeats the question with a towering posture and a gentle bounce.

“In decibels?” the man in front of him responds.

“Yes,” he confirms, bouncing harder now. “In decibels.”

“Dalt.” I put my hand on his arm. “It’s one time. She’ll be fine. Babies are resilient.”

Dalton tears his glare from theliteral CEO of Nasdaqto look at me. As always, his face breaks into a grin. “You’re right. I’m just—”

“I know.” I nod meaningfully before I turn my attention to the baby he’s bouncing in his arms and say in the annoying sing-songy voice I can’t stop using, “Tell Daddy we know it’s the second biggest day of our lives.”

Our daughter, Alyssa Ximena Cavendish—Lissie for short—stares back at me with her father’s light brown eyes. At only eight months old, she can’t speak yet, but the three of us are always aligned mood-wise. When Dalton and I are happy, so is she. When we’re tense, she’s always fussier. Today, all three of us are somewhere between anxious and elated.

We’re about to go public.

And when I saywe, I mean the three of us plus the two-thousand employees who work for Halcyon.

When a company goes public in the United States, it becomes a part of the New York Stock Exchange, which means ownership of the company is distributed across publicly-traded stocks.

Usually, an investment bank oversees the process of going public. When we decided we’d go through the initial public offering (or IPO), Warner Hannington asked Dalton if he might consider hiring his smaller, boutique investment bank (which he founded after Hannington-Hale folded like a floppy piece of New York style pizza). In his text, Warner also confessed he missed Dalton, and since Weston had been fired and became estranged after getting too drunk and peeing on a Smithsonian Museum, he was growing lonelier as he entered his senior years.

Please. That shit obviously didn’t work on Dalton. After all, his actual father continued to text for years until Dalton finally broke his no-response policy and answered one of Frank’s many texts with,I made half a million dollars showing my dick this year.

Needless to say, my husband oversaw the entire IPO himself.

Six years ago, Dalton promised me he would make me more money than I knew what to do with. He wasn’t kidding. Not only has he made the two of us—as the founder and co-founder of Halcyon with a fifty-five percent stake—a metric fuckton, but he’s made a lot of people incomprehensibly wealthy.

We did it by selling sex.

The name Halcyon didn’t just come from the DC condo that catalyzed so many events in our lives; it’s also a word that describes an idyllic, happier time in the past. When Dalton and I were naming our company, I thought Halcyon was perfect. Over time, businesses have evolved to gig models that use labor from working class people and reap the benefits for the elite class. With my own camming site, I wanted to return to a model where people could earn money and keep it.

Halcyon’s concept isn’t complicated: It’s an open platform where any adult can create an account and upload content: photos, videos, audio, or livestreams. The site doesn’t take a cut of the profits—just a few dollars per month that all performers pay regardless of their earnings.

Our founding year was hectic. Within a year, performer and customer signups far exceeded any other adult site. Our waitlists ballooned, and within two years, all those investors who once scoffed at the idea of a website built by two sex workers were clamoring to get an equity stake.

“Do you want me to take her?” my father asks, appearing at my side and holding out his arms. As usual, Lissie’s face lights up when she sees him.

“Essie’s going to hold her,” Dalton responds—we discussed it last night. “But stay nearby. The confetti might scare her, and she’s going to want to see her grandpa.”

My dad pats Dalton on the arm in that fatherly way they’ve grown into over the last six years, and Alyssa—never too far from her namesake—beams at her son. “I’m so proud of you both,” she says, glancing between us. “Can you believe this?”

I can. Six years ago, when Dalton and I sat at our kitchen table and I officially launched Halcyon to the general public, there were just eight publicly traded adult companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Going public has always been our plan.

Now Jeremy, the CEO of Nasdaq, is standing in front of us and saying, “We’re thrilled you’re here. I don’t come out for every opening, but this one is special.”

Nasdaq is a stock exchange, and it’s a tradition for companies to ring the opening bell on the day they go public. By “special,” Jeremy means people are going to be watching: investors, other companies, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world curious about our lucrative little sex company—except it’s not so little anymore.

“We usually do CEOs and family up front by the bell,” he explains, gesturing to the white desk at the front of the stage, “board and key staff close by, and anyone else in the back.”

“Family is going to be us three,” Dalton says, motioning at Lissie and me, “plus Mom and Dad, Christian and the twins, Lander and Valeria and their kids, Cora and Everett, and Claudia.”

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