Page 98 of The Grumpy Billionaire

A few days later, she’s in my office with questions, and I see her looking at my boards.

There’s little chance she could help me with QuantumQuilt, but explaining my thoughts and the problems I’ve encountered with the approaches I’ve tried might help me get perspective.

“You got time to walk through this thing with me?”

She looks around, as if I must have meant something other than the boards.

I go up and wipe a stray mark off the corner. “It could take a bit.”

“No problem!” she says. “Whatever you need.” She’s signed a nondisclosure, so it’s not as if she’s going to tell anyone about it. Not only are the terms ironclad, but nobody crosses Wulfric.

I start at the beginning, explaining the parts that I know are right, moving to the other board to show underlying equations. Eventually we get to the problem.

Brenda stands there looking skeptical.

“What are you thinking?”

She points at an equation. “I just don’t see how this one accounts for what you need it to account for. I don’t see how anything can. Not that…” She pauses, realizing what she’s saying.

“You don’t think it’s crackable.”

“If anybody could crack this, you could,” she says quickly, going on to rephrase this in several different ways, worried that she’s annoyed me.

I’m barely listening. Have I gotten overconfident? Mathematicians who make big breakthroughs have been known to tackle problems that are beyond their abilities.

Brenda shows me her palms. “I wouldn’t have thought AxiomPulse was possible. But you cracked that, so what do I know?”

“You know that lightning rarely strikes the same place twice, that’s what you know.”

“It’ll strike if you make it strike,” she says.

I nod. And the sun will be purple if you make it purple.

We stare at the board, and she asks me more questions. The questions are insightful. It’s a long afternoon of staring at the board and going over the same ground from different angles.

“This was helpful,” I say.

“We didn’t get you down the road any,” she says. “But I think it’s brilliant—what you did in this section.” She taps the solid section.

“Unless the goal is wrong,” I say.

She shoots me a baffled look. “Excuse me?”

“What if I can’t get down the road all the way because the vehicle itself is faulty?”

“Meaning the concept of the data model itself?”

“What if? What’s the saying—you can’t pick up a rug that you’re standing on?”

Brenda seems to find that interesting. I like that she doesn’t discount it; her instincts are excellent. “You can’t solve a data model with a data model? But no, that’s not it.”

“But something like that,” I say.

We regard each other silently. No way will I be able to present this month or even this year with a direction like that.

My quest with Stella is beginning to feel just as impossible as QuantumQuilt. The boundaries she puts up around our relationship are nothing short of maddening. We have a once-in-a-lifetime connection, yet she’ll never sleep over. She won’t dine out. She doesn’t want to exchange details about our lives unless it’s something she’s burning with curiosity about.

And she still won’t accept my gift.

---