Page 35 of My Mystery Billionaire

And that means I have to ask him about this Hank Enders thing that Craig put in my head. I will never ever rest easy until I get the answer.

Has my trust in Hendrik been misplaced?

Chapter 41

Hendrik

Icertainlyknewthismoment might come, and I guess it was none too soon. While I had nothing to hide, I did!

Old habits die hard. I've been keeping secrets a secret for so long that it doesn't even feel like a secret anymore. It feels like the truth.

I arrive at the restaurant thanks to one of Trey’s drivers, and it looks like I'm there before Beatrice.

I should have sent one of the men for her. Well, I will be doing so from now on. She shouldn't have to take the subway any time of day. I certainly don't!

Beatrice walked in, looking gorgeous.

And looking fierce. Yes indeed. The time has come.

I stood and pulled out her chair for her and as she sat I gave her a kiss on the cheek right in front of her ear. “You look gorgeous,” I whispered to her, “And I have some news for you.”

I sat down. Looked at her. She was about to open her mouth. I held up my hand.

“I think I'm the one who knows more about Hank Enders than anyone else on the planet.” Beatrice's jaw dropped, but she remained silent.

“When he was in college, he started a company that at first had no name, no employees, and for the first six months not a single client. But he was a ferocious kind of geek, like a dog with a bone about his product idea, and he kept at it until he got his first big client. That big name brought some other clients in. He started having a lot of money and no time. He was just barely getting to class and he did okay on his exams. He kept at his coursework so that he didn’t flunk out, but the business consumed him.”

By this point in my story our favorite waitress came over and we chatted amicably with her and placed our usual gigantic food order. I poured out some Jasmine tea for us and carried on my story.

“So this digital dude decided to hire, the way it was done then and now, some remote workers. He was pretty good at what he did and he got more and more clients signed on who paid good money for his products. Because by now he didn't have just one product. He had expanded it out into a whole package of services. He was a technology guy like us. A digital dude.”

“And finally, one day about three years into the business, his advisors told him that, first of all, he had to start hiring some permanent staff and slow down with the remote freelancers. He’d have to rent some space for them to work in. They told him, second of all, that it was high time—given the tremendous sales revenue the company was earning—for him to step up and be the public figurehead of the company. The company needed a face to its name. He declined.”

I saw that Beatrice was ready to ask me some more questions, so I held up my hand and shook my head once again.

“He declined, and he asked his attorneys to figure out a way that the company could get the good publicity it needed without his name or image appearing anywhere. And they did it. As you probably have already guessed, the digital dude was Hank Enders and his company got named MetriCooks. He felt like there were a lot of “cooks” in the “metric” kitchen by then, so he just put the two words together into MetriCooks.”

Beatrice again opened her mouth and raised her finger in the air but I stopped her one more time.

Just one last thing, my beauty.

“Hank Enders only met a very small handful of the thousands of employees the company came to employ. Of course, he had started with remote employees who never met him or saw his image anyway. And as he got more and more staff to do the work, he didn't need to come into the office to do his job anymore, either. He kept on working remotely, as he’d done from the beginning. He never met clients. The only ones he interacted with face-to-face were his attorneys and a couple of other advisors. So the new staff at the company never met him. Never saw his face. Never spoke with him.”

I stopped at that point.

I think it's the most I've spoken at one time, even with Beatrice!

But she deserves to know this.

Iwanther to know it.

I dove into my dinner as I waited for her inevitable questions.

She finally asked me, “So where is Hank Enders now?”

I thought she would faint when I responded, “Hank Enders has never existed.”

Chapter 42

---