Page 44 of A Ticking Time Boss

“I don’t pretend anything,” he says.

“I’m not convinced. You’re the biggest charmer I’ve ever met. Were you yourself at that Reporters’ Ball, with the date you brought? Or with the blonde I saw you with the night we met?”

Carter leans back in his seat and gives me a calculating look. “You’ve been paying attention.”

“Of course I have. I don’t know many venture capitalist billionaire CEOs.”

“I know too many,” he replies.

“Wouldn’t you agree, though? That you wear a mask?”

He’s quiet for another beat. “Maybe I do,” he says, reaching for his beer.

“I get that it’s probably safer for you in some cases,” I admit. “With all the people trying to con you. If only they could see you now, eating twelve-dollar pizza in a worn-down restaurant in Queens.”

“They’d never stop calling,” he says.

“So, we’ve psychoanalyzed me. I want to know the same things about you. What do your parents do?”

His lips quirk in a half-smile. “My mother’s a teacher. She works at an elementary school right around here.”

“So that’s why you grew up in Queens?”

“Yes. We lived just a few blocks over.”

“Normal childhood?”

“Normal enough,” he says. “No mini quiches, if that’s what you mean.”

“No one really needs mini quiches,” I say. “So, do you also have a sibling who answers your texts sporadically?”

“Not really,” he says.

“Not really? Isn’t that a yes or no question?”

His mouth twists into another one of his smiles, but this one feels more rehearsed. “Not really,” he repeats, voice smooth.

I laugh. “Mysterious. I respect that.”

“It was mostly my mother and me,” he says. “She still lives in the area, actually.”

I put two and two together. “You’ve been to this restaurant a lot, haven’t you?”

“Every other Friday, like clockwork,” he says with a grin.

“That’s why the hostess recognized you!”

He looks over at the woman, busy with showing a new party to their table. “Fiona. She recognizes me, but isn’t quite sure who I am, I think.”

“Wow.”

He gives me a level look. “I’m a normal person, you know. Even if I am your boss’s boss’s boss.”

“I’m starting to realize that, yeah.”

“I have a question for you,” he says. “Did you always know you wanted to be a journalist? All that work, college, the paper… what put you on this path?”

I chew slowly, drawing out the pause. The real answer is complicated, but I don’t have to give the long one. “I’ve always loved to write,” I say. “But I’ve always been interested in the world around me too. My father, he reads the Globe every day. On Sundays he stretches it out into a half-day event. I’d sit next to him and ask about articles. It seemed like a magical thing. Stories, information, hot takes. It felt like the whole world was contained inside those thin pages.”

---