The Underwriting (29 page)

“You are seriously the greatest.” Todd clinked her glass, his chest melting with relief.

The waiter came back with the dessert menu. Todd ordered an espresso martini, deciding the best course of action now was to get very, very drunk. Or maybe he could get her very, very drunk, and then she'd pass out before they had to have sex?

He sipped his martini and ordered a cheese plate.

She polished off a chocolate torte and ate the petits fours.

She excused herself to the bathroom as he gave the waiter his corporate card.

“Todd?” He looked up at the familiar voice. Louisa LeMay, his old fuck buddy, stood slim beside the table. Her tight black dress clung to her tiny waist at his eye level, and her face glowed in a slightly tipsy smile.

“Louisa?” His heart caught. “What are you doing here?”

She turned her gaze toward the bar, where an old man was sipping a scotch, grinning at her. She smiled back at him. “Too many martinis,” she laughed, lifting her fingers to indicate she was on her third.

“How long are you in town? Can I take you out?” he asked, the memory of her body against his making him forget how much work he had to do before Sunday.

“I go back tomorrow,” she said, then added, “And it probably wouldn't be appropriate anyway.”

“Why not?”

She bit her lip and blushed. “I think I might be in love,” she said, lifting her shoulders. “Can you believe it? Me?”

Todd's jaw dropped. He looked back at the man at the bar. He was old and not even attractive. “What?” he snapped, not comprehending.

She shrugged. “I don't know. Something just happened. I didn't think I'd ever want to settle down, but this guy is just so . . .”

Joan came back to the table, looking at Louisa, who turned. “Hi, I'm Louisa.”

“Joan.” The two women shook hands.

“Anyway,” Louisa said to Todd, “I'll let you get back to each other, but really nice to see you, Todd, and great to meet you, Joan.” Her happiness made him want to vomit.

Joan's eyes followed her back to the bar, studying her jealously.

“Is that Callum Rees?” she asked, and Todd realized she was looking at the man, not Louisa.

He turned. “What?”

“Callum Rees. The billionaire who started all those companies.”

“No way.” Todd turned. “Is it?”

“I think so.” She lifted her brow. “Good for Louisa.”

The waiter returned with Todd's credit card before he could process Louisa falling in love with Callum Rees. He looked at the receipt, then coughed: the bill was $3,618. “Shit.” He looked up at the champagne: it was $2,600, and didn't even taste good.

“Everything okay?” Joan asked.

“Absolutely.” He smiled. The normal expense limit for client dinners was three hundred dollars a head, but he'd get the bill approved once he explained the reason: keeping the deal from getting delayed was worth a lot more to L.Cecil than thirty-six hundred.

He helped her out of her chair and tested his willpower, putting his arm on the small of her back as they left the restaurant. He hoped Louisa wasn't looking. Ordinarily, he'd try to make her jealous, but being with a woman like Joan just made him feel foolish. But when he glanced back at her, she was laughing with Callum, absorbed in their conversation and oblivious to Todd. It would have been more comfortable if she'd just slapped him in the face.

“Are you going uptown?” Joan interrupted his disappointment.

“Just across,” he said. “It's a nice night—do you want to walk?” He needed more time. She was not attractive and had just eaten more than a linebacker, and seeing her side by side with Louisa had made it all even worse.

“I'm on Eighty-seventh and York,” she said. “It'd be a bit of a hike.”

“Oh, I'll get us a cab, then,” he said, reaching out his hand and praying she didn't have cats.

A car arrived and he opened the door for her. “It was good to see you, Todd,” she said, climbing in and putting her hand on the door to close it. “Congratulations on your continued rise.”

“Wha—” He stared at her extended arm. “I—”

“What?” she asked, pausing.

He looked up, shaking his head, dumbfounded. Was she leaving? Without him?

“What kind of person do you think I am, Todd?” She laughed.

“I thought you—” he started, his brain trying to compute: she
didn't
want to sleep with him?

“Wanted to get a good dinner,” she finished his sentence. “We never get this shit in government. Have a good night, Todd.” She laughed again, pulling the cab door shut.

“Yeah, you too,” he said to the already closed door. “And thanks,” he called after the cab.

He started walking west, his heart emptying with drunken relief that the deal was saved and he didn't have to sleep with Joan, and disappointment that someone else was going to sleep with Louisa.
Whatever:
she wasn't who he thought she was—just another shallow girl who wanted to lock a man down. And Todd didn't want to be locked down any more than he wanted to sleep with Joan Hillier.

Still: Why
didn't
Joan Hillier want to sleep with him? And why
didn't
Louisa want to lock him down?

Todd paused on the corner and logged into Hook. He sent a message to a cute blonde:

You have to forgive me if this is forward, but I find you so stunning . . . do you want to have a drink with me?

He copy-pasted the message to six other girls who were within a mile radius. Four wrote back before he got to Fifth Avenue. He picked the one closest to his apartment and met her at the door.

AMANDA

T
UESDAY
, A
PRIL
29; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

Amanda opened a bottle of wine and poured an oversized glass. She sat on the edge of the sofa, taking a deep breath, opening the LSAT study book.

She stared at the words, but didn't read them. San Francisco sucked.

The weather sucked, which no one had bothered to mention, blatantly lying with their
“Oh, lucky you to be going to California and escaping East Coast cold”
farewells when she'd left New York. But here she was, trapped in microclimate arctic hell, the damp rain chilling her bones and ruining her shoes. Shoes she wasn't even sure why she bothered to wear: no one wore heels in this city, or dressed up at all. She could let herself go entirely and would
still
be the most attractive person for miles and it would
still
suck because the guys here were all so arrogant. But not like New York guys were arrogant: New York guys at least had fashion and taste to show for their egos. Here the guys derived their inflated sense of self-worth from knowledge of which start-ups had funding and who had been in TechCrunch and which farmers' market had the best locally sourced raw organic gluten-free sustainable kale chips with biodegradable packaging.

Which is why Amanda was going to law school. It hadn't been a mistake, coming to California, because now she had more confidence that grad school was the right move. There would be great men in law school, men who were smart in a not-computer-programmer way and—oh, fuck, what did she know? She pushed the books off the table and sat back on the couch, taking a gulp of her wine.

Maybe the problem was her: maybe she expected too much. At the end of the day she hadn't done anything particularly noteworthy. Sure, she'd gone to a good university and worked at a good law firm, but she'd never led a deal or started a company. She'd never even had a boyfriend. Maybe she didn't deserve to be remembered by a guy like Todd Kent, or respected by a guy like Ben Loftis.

She finished the glass of wine and poured another, then reached for the remote. The TV came on to CNBC.

They were reporting on the Kelly Jacobson case again. The police had found a water bottle with Molly residue on it and arrested Robby Goodman, accusing him of lacing the water bottle and giving it to the girl so he could have sex with her.

“Do you think he did it?” Julie asked.

Amanda jumped, startled to find Julie standing behind her. She turned back to the TV and shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters,” Julie said seriously.

“Not really. I mean, his life is over either way.”

“But what if he's innocent?”

“Even if he's innocent of the murder, they'll dig up enough to prove he's a douchebag.”

“That's not a crime,” Julie said. “Everyone gets drunk in college.”

“And a lot of people try drugs like Kelly did,” Amanda said. “But once the media decides to portray someone as a villain, no one is going to risk his own reputation to identify with him. It's why the media basically runs the legal system now. It's so fucked up,” she said.

“Is that why you want to be a lawyer? To fix it?”

“Don't be naive.” She rolled her eyes. Why did everyone in San Francisco think their purpose in life was to change the world? “It's human nature to create heroes and villains. You can't fix that.”

The TV shut off and Amanda turned to Julie, who held the remote in her hand but was looking at Amanda, her jaw set.

“What did you do that for?”

“Get a jacket,” Julie commanded.

“What?”

“You're being a bitch,” she said. “Now get a jacket. We're leaving.”

“But I've got to—”

Julie cut her off with a glare.

“Fine,” she said, standing from the couch and picking up her fleece.

She followed Julie out the door onto the street, walking quickly to keep up with the girl's irritated clip. She'd never seen Julie in a less than deliriously exuberant state and wasn't sure what to make of it.

—

T
HEY
GOT
TO
THE
T
IPSY
P
IG
and Julie led Amanda to a table on the patio in the back, where a heat lamp warded off the damp evening air. The patio was pretty, strung with flowers and arching trees above the wooden picnic tables where groups and couples dined.

“I'll have a Kentucky mule and she'll start with water. We'll share a mac and cheese,” Julie told the waitress, before turning to Amanda. “Now,” she said, “what's the matter?”

“What?” Amanda said defensively.

“You've been moping for the past two weeks, and it's getting annoying to be around,” she said bluntly. “So why don't we talk about whatever set you off, so you can start to get over it and put us all out of your misery.”

Amanda's jaw dropped. Where had this Julie come from? “I—” Amanda started.

Julie waited.

“There's a guy,” Amanda finally said. “Todd Kent. One of the bankers working on your IPO. We used to date. When I was in New York.”

“Did you really date?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you actually go on dates.”

“Not exactly. But it's different in New York. Men don't—”

“So you used to hook up with Todd Kent,” Julie corrected. “You did not date him, although you wanted to.”

“Yes,” Amanda conceded. She made it seem so . . . uncomplicated.

“Then what happened?”

“Then I moved here, and I saw him,” Amanda said, then corrected, “I mean, I heard he was here, and I went to see him, and he didn't”—she'd never said it, even to herself—“remember me.”

“So he's an asshole,” Julie said.

“No”—Amanda shook her head—“he's just—”

“Conceited, self-centered, thoughtless and rude.”

“But he could be—”

“But he isn't,” Julie corrected.

“I think guys like that can change, when they meet the right girl.”

“Which you clearly are not, given he didn't remember you after you slept with him.”

Amanda looked at her hands. Was it really that simple? And that obvious?

“If it makes you feel any better, Beau was exactly the same way,” Julie said. “You know he hasn't texted in two weeks? We finally had sex and then, poof! Gone! Just leaving me to wonder whether I wasn't good or something.” She rolled her eyes. “What a waste. I've probably spent ten hours thinking about it this past week—can you imagine how much happier I'd have been if I spent that time on something productive? I think I'll take a year off of men.”

“You're twenty-six.” Amanda made a face. “You can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“You'll miss your window.”

Julie looked straight at her, her eyes full of pity that made Amanda feel vulnerable and exposed. “Please don't tell me you actually believe your value has an expiration date,” she said.

“I—” she started, caught off guard. “I guess I'm just afraid of ending up alone,” Amanda finally admitted. “My mother,” she added, “is alone. And she's . . . pathetic.”

“Are you like your mother?” Julie asked softly.

“God, no.” Amanda recoiled at the thought. Her mother had dropped out of a tiny college in Florida to marry her father. She'd lived off alimony since the divorce, always too much of a snob from her decade of marriage to a doctor to get any of the jobs her modest education made available.

“So how could you end up like her?”

“If a man—” Amanda started, then stopped. She'd never thought about it that way before.

“Even if you did end up alone—and you won't because you're gorgeous and smart and nice when you're not all up in your own head—you still wouldn't have to have your mother's life.”

Amanda sat for a long moment considering the thought.

“Here you go,” the waitress said, delivering their mac and cheese with two forks.

“She can have a drink now,” Julie told the waitress.

The girls ate the mac and cheese and drank another round. They talked about how jealous they both were that Juan got to go to London for the Hook road show, and Julie opened up about how she had started Stanford as a computer science major, but could never get anyone to take her seriously. She'd taken the job at Hook as a receptionist so she could see all parts of the business. And she had: no one paid attention to the receptionist, so she'd quietly become privy to how things got done in the organization, and which employees were set to bounce after the IPO.

Two guys came up and asked if they could join and Julie said “yes” before Amanda could say “no” and after fifteen minutes they actually weren't so bad, even though all they talked about was the company they were starting that made no sense but had apparently gotten one million dollars in funding.

The bar closed at one o'clock and the girls said good night to the guys and walked home in the fog that no longer seemed so grim. It was late and Amanda had had a lot to drink, but her mind was clear and energized, and she was happy in a way that felt real.

“What if we started a company together?” she mused.

“What?” Julie asked.

“We're way smarter than those guys we just met, and they got one million . . .” Amanda said, the idea feeling like one of the more reasonable ones she'd ever had. “And with all the extra time we'll have if we both take a year off men . . .”

Julie's lips curled into a smile and Amanda felt her heart flutter, seeing a new—better—path unfold before her.

NICK

T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
1; L
ONDON
, E
NGLAND

This
was how life was supposed to be, Nick thought as the plane touched down in London. He was meant to be taking international trips on private jets, heading to meetings where the most important fund managers in the world gathered to listen to him speak about his company's potential, while guys like Todd and girls like Tara catered to his needs. Finally, the universe was recognizing his importance within it.

A black limousine was waiting to drive them to the hotel, a Four Seasons on Park Lane.

“I thought I asked that we stay at a Starwood property?” He turned to Tara in the car.

“You're going to spend all of three hours in your room, Nick,” she said.

“All the more reason to stay somewhere I can collect points.” He'd made a firm commitment that no matter how rich he got, he was never going to be the kind of person who threw away money by disregarding loyalty programs. “Can you make sure that we're properly booked for other cities?”

“I'll see what we can do,” she conceded.

“Next time, please don't make me ask twice,” he pressed. “Tiffany, can you make sure she follows up?” he said, turning to his new assistant.

“Sure thing, Nick.” Tiffany smiled warmly.

Snatching up Tiffany, the assistant at Darrell Greene's office, had been Nick's first move as CEO. She'd been expensive—$275,000 a year—but it was worth it to have someone you could trust. Plus she was a certified notary.

Nick wasn't trying to be difficult by asking about the hotel, he just knew it was critical, in this early stage as leader, to set the right precedents. All eyes were on him, watching to see how he'd handle his new responsibility, making judgments based on every little move. People were going to test him, and if he let them get away with the slightest mediocrity, they'd think he was weak.

And Tara Taylor was at the top of that list. She'd snuck her way onto CNBC to talk about the changes at the company—a privilege and responsibility that clearly belonged to Nick. She'd said it was Rachel's idea, but he sensed she was behind it. Tara was more clever than he'd originally thought: she hid behind her nice, pretty, play-dumb-girl persona, but she knew exactly what she was doing going on CNBC, and he was not about to let her steal any more of his moments to boost her own career.

—

T
HE
FIRST
PRESENTATION
went off without a hitch. As did the second, and the third. All the fund managers loved Silicon Valley and wanted to be part of the world Nick was creating. At six o'clock, the black cars whisked them across London to Shoreditch House, the members-only club where they were having dinner with an exclusive list of British fund managers. Everything else had just been a warm-up for these guys.

Nick checked his phone for Facebook “Likes” on his job status change to CEO: only three. Maybe he had accidentally disabled something? He checked his settings, then went to his own news feed.

Grace had posted on her wall:
Kelly Jacobson Memorial Fund Hits $2 Million!!!!