Page 73 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
“I-I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind is somewhere else today, and frankly, this talk is boring.”
Caught by surprise, a good portion of the crowd laughed. The people exiting stopped to listen.
“I’ve been thinking,” Oliver said. “Why do we care about numbers?” He shut the lid of his laptop and abandoned his planned presentation.
“Because they’re tangible,” the man who’d winced earlier said.
“Exactly,” Oliver said. “They’re something solid to hold on to. We know a number’s value. And complex mathematical calculations make us feel secure, like a safety net beneath our biggest financial decisions.
“For me, I’ve always clung tightly to numbers, because they meant order in a world I otherwise couldn’t control. But you know what? We can’t predict the future, whether through tea leaves or tarot cards or math. The financial models we make are not guarantees; they’re simply hypotheses played out, no more a sure thing than anything else in life.
“True, the numbers are based in reality. But I think that if we lean too heavily on them, we deceive ourselves. There’s always an element of the unknown, even in math. And we have to learn to be comfortable with that.Ihave to learn to be comfortable with that.”
Oliver realized something that had been a long time coming—he didn’t want to work at an investment bank anymore. He’d accumulated enough savings to undo the traumatic insecurity of his youth, and now he needed a purpose greater than making financial models just for money’s sake.
Maybe he could find a way back to his pure love for math. Like, teaching at a university. Or even better, at an elementary school with students who needed a little extra attention, as Ben had when they were kids and their family was on the run.
Maybe Oliver would move to Virginia to be closer to his family. Or maybe he’d find his place elsewhere in New York.
He didn’t know. But maybe that was okay, too.
Oliver thought of the most recent message in the paper rose that had appeared on his hotel room dresser this morning:On the other side of risk is the very real possibility of happiness.
Maybe his pen pal was onto something.
“We can’t always cling tight to numbers or the things we think give us certainty,” Oliver said to the audience. “We have to be willing to jump off cliffs. Sometimes we’ll belly flop into the ocean below. But sometimes, we’ll meet the water just right, and it will be the most beautiful, worthwhile dive.”
The audience stared at him in silence. This was not at all the standard for a Neo Fintech talk.
Then one woman in the back began to clap.
Slowly, others joined in. It wasn’t everyone, like in the movies. It wasn’t even most of them.
But it was enough, and Oliver smiled, easily and for real this time.
Chloe
AfterThe Today Showclip, Chloe had run out the door and across the street to the park, stumbling onto the path that looped through the grass and trees.
She tried to remind herself that Oliver didn’t know she had invented the paper roses. That he wouldn’t have commented so cruelly if he’d known it was her.
But did it matter? Because if that was his unfiltered, honest opinion of the very thing she’d poured her soul into, then how could she possibly love a man like that?
She paced and paced around the park’s path, losing track of how many times she wove through it, her mind bouncing back and forth between the Oliver she thought she knew—who was still, at his core, the same as the boy from long ago—and the callous version on CNBC.
And that made it even worse, didn’t it? That he’d thoroughly disparaged her work on national TV!
Eventually, feet aching, Chloe sank down onto the bench where she usually liked to read, the one where Giovanni fed scraps of baguettes to pigeons on the weekend. There was no one else around right now, though, being the middle of a Tuesday.
Not long after she’d sat, though, a familiar voice said, “Chloe?”
She blinked—partly through a sheen of tears and partly at the sun—and looked up. “Zac? What’re you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in the office?”
“No. I should be right here.” He had clearly been in the office, though, because he was wearing part of a suit; the jacket must have been left behind. “As soon as I sawThe Today Showsegment,” Zac said, “I came over. Becca told me I might find you here. Are you all right?”
Chloe shook her head and ducked into the arm Zac offered.
“I didn’t know you watchedThe Today Show,” Chloe murmured into his chest.
