The Underwriting (25 page)

W
EDNESDAY
, A
PRIL
16; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Hey, do you want to grab dinner tonight?” Todd caught Tara's sleeve as she turned to the elevator. “Please don't make me hang out with Nick.”

“I'm having dinner with Rachel,” she said, “then heading straight to the airport.” Her brain was still spinning from her morning with Neha and she was looking forward to talking it through with Rachel, who she knew would have good perspective.

“Rachel Liu?” Todd's brow furrowed.

“Yeah,” Tara said, watching his face, and concealing a smile as she imagined him as a gorilla having sex with the PR rep. “And I'm actually a little late, so—”

“Yeah, sure,” Todd said. “Good job today, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she said, her smile changing from bemusement to genuine appreciation. It was the first time he'd ever complimented her, and it meant a lot.

—

A
T
THE
RESTAURANT
Tara sat down and checked her BlackBerry while she waited for Rachel. There was another e-mail from her mother asking if she'd bought her ticket to Maine for her sister's wedding.
I'll do it tomorrow
, she wrote back, irritated, but also not sure why she hadn't booked it yet. The road show started next week in London and would wrap up two weeks later, culminating with the pricing call and IPO on May 8. She could fly straight to Maine from New York and celebrate the deal closing along with her sister's wedding.

“Hello there.” She looked up at the British accent. Callum Rees took off his black leather jacket and sat across from her at the table.

She tilted her head, surprised. “I'm sorry, I'm meeting—”

“Me,” he finished her sentence. “Rachel had something come up, so I filled in.”

“I don't—”

“Want to eat dinner alone.”

“But—” she protested. She could feel her cheeks redden. Had Rachel also told him her theory that Tara should sleep with him?

“We'll have a bottle of the pinot noir,” Callum told the waiter, ignoring Tara. “Then I'll have the duck, and the zucchini fritters to start. She'll have the winter salad, dressing on the side, to begin, followed by the salmon. And do you think you could do all vegetables instead of vegetables and potatoes?”

“You can't—” she started again, then shifted her tone. “You're not even going to let me order?”

“Did I get it wrong?”

It was exactly what she'd have chosen from the menu, except that she was too embarrassed to ask for no potatoes, so was planning to just eat around them. “That's not the point,” she said. “What if someone—”

He watched her, sipping his water with an eyebrow cocked.

She paused, then relented. “Am I really that predictable?”

“Salad and fish? Yes.”

“Why do you want to have dinner, then, if you know me already?”

“I think your clichés have been adopted,” he said as the waiter returned with the wine. “And that there's more to you than the way you've been trained.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Three reasons.”

She waited.

“One: your outburst at the Frick. No good banker would have thought to stand up to a billionaire, even a shit like Rick Frier.”

Tara blushed.

“Two: you turned down every single boy on Hook, even the really rich one. Most girls in New York would at least have gotten a dinner out of him.”

“You were watching me?” She thought back to how she'd wasted time on Hook while she waited for Callum at the Crosby.

“Yes,” he said without apology.

“And the third reason?”

“You had a hole in your sweater that evening.”

“What?” Tara's jaw dropped.

Callum lifted his arm and pointed underneath it. “Right here. The seam had split and you kept moving your arm, oblivious, and I could see your turquoise bra,” he said, then added, “Interesting color selection.”

Tara's face burned. Was he making it up? Had she really not noticed a hole in her sweater? “I don't understand what that says about my character,” she lied. She knew exactly what it said: that she was not at all put together enough to be a successful woman in business.

“It says that your perfectionist habits are not innate.”

“I am so embarrassed.”

“Why?” He furrowed his brow. “It was very sexy. You kept moving your arm, like a chicken”—he imitated—“yelling at me for my morals.”

He took a sip of his wine and grinned as though he'd won a game.

“That's humiliating,” she sighed.

“If that's your version of humiliation, you don't have a very interesting life.”

“Thanks for making me feel better.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I heard you did a great job in the presentation today.”

“Are you regretting wanting to sell your shares?” she said wryly.

“Not in the least.”

“I'm sorry, why did you come here again?”

“To see you,” he said.

Her cheeks burned: why?

“Where's Katerina?”

“In New York, I suspect?” Callum shrugged. “Don't really care, to be honest.”

“Did you cover for me?” Tara asked. “With Catherine?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “But only because it benefitted Catherine.”

“What do you mean?” she asked carefully.

“Over the long term, you're more important to her than Rick Frier, but she wouldn't have seen it that way. Banks think too much in the short term.”

“But John Lewis got fired, for something I—”

“John Lewis got fired because he wasn't a good banker. If he had been, my report wouldn't have been enough to get him canned.”

“But—”

“You can just say ‘thank you,'” Callum said. “You don't always have to make it more complicated.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“So what were you trying to say with Rick that night, about your generation?”

“Oh, I don't know,” she demurred, “I think the wine had just gone to my head.”

“Your generation really is a self-entitled lot, though. Incredibly absorbed in yourselves.”

“See,” she said, riling back up, “you say that like it's our own fault we're self-focused when we were raised the way we were.”

“Gotcha.” He smiled.

She blushed.

“Go on,” he said, “I'm interested. Really.”

“I just think your generation doesn't recognize how unsettling it was, to grow up in this world that was simultaneously hyper-competitive and committed to giving everyone a trophy. We signed up for everything in this effort to get ahead, but then everyone was too afraid of hurting our feelings to ever tell us whether we were actually good or not. We
did
everything, but had no idea whether we were actually
good
at anything.”

“Forgive me for not having pity on a generation that had boundless opportunity and relentless encouragement.”

“I'm not saying you should feel sorry for us, I'm just saying it's worth recognizing how incredibly destabilizing that is—to never know whether you're good or not, but always feel like you're being judged. It's a constant state of anxiety over not being good enough.”

“Good enough for what?”

She shrugged. “Your job? Your parents? A man? The life you're supposed to want?”

The waiter returned again and set the plates in front of them.

Callum sat back. “Can I offer you a piece of advice?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Figure out what you really want,” he said, “as opposed to what you're supposed to want. It's worth the time.”

“I could be happy doing a lot of different things,” she said. “I think I'm very lucky in that regard.”

“That,”
he said, “is the definition of settling. You may be able to make yourself happy doing a lot of things, but there is one life that you want more than other lives, and it is definitely not the one in which you wake up when you're fifty and figure out what you like after it's too late to do anything about it.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then I know what I want: it's to be on the path that I'm on, which, it turns out, is really starting to take off.”

“Your path to being Catherine Wiley?”

“Yes.”

“You want the life wherein you work all the time, never smile or laugh, have a drunk for a husband and daughters you never see?” He lifted a brow. “You haven't thought hard enough.”

“You're her friend.”

“That doesn't mean I think you should want what she has.”

“She's achieved a huge amount,” she said. “And that comes with trade-offs.”

“There's more to life than achievement,” he said. “You have to learn to enjoy things that aren't measurable.”

She looked down at her salad. “How did you know what you wanted?” she asked.

“I didn't,” he said. “But I knew I wanted to have an interesting life, and that sitting behind a desk a hundred hours a week like you do was never going to be interesting.”

“That's not fair,” she said defensively. “It's interesting learning about deals, and it's exciting to be a part of them.”

“And I knew that if I took a high-paying corporate job, I'd be susceptible to convincing myself that it was interesting and never make time to think about what I actually wanted.”

“But it is—”

“Interesting to some people,” Callum agreed, “but not most of them, and certainly not you.” He held out his fork with a bit of fried zucchini on the end. “Want some?”

She held up a hand to decline.

“Come on,” he said, “quit being afraid.”

She leaned forward, took the bite off the fork, and let it melt on her tongue.

“There we go.” He smiled. “Small steps.”

The waiter brought their entrées and refilled Tara's wine.

“The real thing to understand about your generation,” Callum started in again, “is that the financial crisis is the greatest thing to ever happen to you.”

“What?” she scoffed. “My bonus has hardly beaten inflation in the past four years, and taxes are going up.”

“Exactly the point,” he said. “The economic situation is so dire that it's pointless to do a job for the money anymore. And if you're not doing a job for the money, you're forced to ask yourself what you
are
doing it for. And, unlike your bosses, you're at an age when you can actually make a change.”

“Are you telling me I should quit my job?” she finally asked.

“No,” he said. “I'm telling you to be really sure it's what makes you happy, and if you determine the answer is no, you should quit and figure out what does.”

“That's easy for you to say when you have a billion-dollar bank account.”

“What is it with you and the money?” he said, exasperated. “I'm not saying it's
easy
, and I'm not saying there aren't a lot of things to work out, but you're never going to have fewer excuses. And it's frustrating, at my age, to see a lot of smart people sitting in their stuffy jobs, miserable, when there are so many problems in the world they have the brains and energy and access to solve
and
that would make them happier, if they'd just stop being so afraid of messing up their résumés.”

He stopped to take a breath, then laughed lightly. “How's that for a soapbox?”

“Pretty good.” She smiled.

He leaned forward so that his face was six inches from her own. She could smell his aftershave and see his laugh lines.

“Did it feel good?” he asked. “To say what you believed?”

“In the moment,” she said.

“Listen to
that
,” he said.

“What if it gets me fired?”

“Then you'll know you weren't in the right position.”

“Why do you care so much about me?”

His hazel eyes searched hers, and their gazes darted back and forth together. He smiled, then pushed back in his seat and lifted his glass.

“I think you're interesting,” he said, sipping his wine, then added, “and I'd like to sleep with you.”

She laughed and bit her lip, not offended.

The alarm on her phone rang to remind her about her flight. “I have to go to the airport.” She turned off the ringer and reached for her wallet.

He grimaced at her gesture. “I'm a billionaire.”

“Right,” she conceded, excusing herself to the restroom.

When she returned, Callum was on the street by a black car. “I ordered you an Uber,” he said, opening the door. “But I'm taking this.” He held up the
Self
magazine she'd had tucked in the pocket of her carry-on to read on the plane.

“You're taking my ten tips to a flatter stomach?”

“You don't need it,” he said. “You're good enough.”

“But—”

“And I know that makes you feel like I'm telling you you're not going to make it, but you are,” he said.

She stood still, not sure what to say, but feeling like she'd like to kiss him.

“Go.” He patted her hip to get moving. “You're going to be late.”

“Will I—” she said. “I mean, do you—”

“Want to see you again? Yes,” he said. “I'm visiting my niece in New York this weekend. Think you could escape for dinner Saturday?”

“Yes,” she said, a bit too quickly. “I mean, Saturday should work.”

“It's a date,” he said.

“Great.” She smiled. “It's a date.”

She let her head fall back on the seat, watching the streetlights rush by and feeling her heartbeat light in her chest.
What are you doing?
she asked herself. She could feel her mind spinning but didn't want to stop it, just wanted to sit and spin.