16. Cali
CALI
The napkin is going in the mail.
That's the decision I make somewhere on the F train home, wedged between a man clipping his nails and a teenager watching a video at full volume without headphones.
Not in any way you'd understand.
Not no.
Not how could you think that.
Not any of the reasonable, humane answers that would match the good guy act he's been putting on.
So, yeah. Napkin. Envelope. Stamp. Done.
I'll find a real lawyer. A fourth lawyer. A fifth, a sixth, however many it takes. I'll sell a kidney to cover the retainer. I'll represent myself in a Halloween costume of a suit if I have to.
What I will not do is keep circling the drain of a man who makes me feel seen one minute and strung along the next.
I'm proud of myself, honestly. This is growth. Old Cali would never have been this brave.
I'm still congratulating myself when I climb the steps to the brownstone. The kids will be getting dropped off via carpool from summer camp in an hour or so, so I have time to make a nutritious dinner, clean up, run a load of laundry, and get some work done.
I'm still congratulating myself when I finish all that with minutes to spare and I crack my laptop open purely to check whether that one client from Denver signed the contract yet—
—just in time for the notification to pop up.
COMPANY FORMATION PORTAL: A filing has been submitted associated with your entity. Review recommended.
I frown. Click.
And just like that, all my bravery disappears.
I don't understand all of it, but I get the gist. There's been some kind of filing, couched in phrases revolving around a founder's interest and an officer's option, which I half-recognize from the DocuSign envelopes I found in Todd's email three lifetimes ago.
Bottom line is, someone is poking at my cap table.
Whoever that someone is, they're trying to exercise some old provision buried in the papers I signed without reading.
Some right that a registered agent or an officer might have to force equity out from under the founder.
The founder being me.
The equity being mine.
Bottom line: Someone's trying to steal my company.
The answer is obvious.
Todd.
Of course it's him. Who else? Men like your husband don't quit, said the man I was about to mail a Please fuck off forever napkin to.
They lose, but then they regroup. I called him a fearmonger in my head, cursed him for cursing me, marched into his office to yell at him for being right—and here it is, exactly as he promised.
Which leaves me, to put it simply, screwed.
Every good lawyer in this city costs fifty thousand dollars I don't have and/or won't return my calls.
I know exactly one powerful man. One singular man who understands the system and might be able to do something about this.
Oh, goddammit.
He answers on the second ring. "Ms. Meadows."
"I need the second date," I say. "Right now."
"Is everything okay?"
"There's a bar two blocks from my house. The Woozy Tiger, on Hudson. I…"
I consider pouring out everything that's happening, but I don't like how wobbly and teary I'm sounding, so I decide to take the fifteen-minute trek there as my chance to pull myself together and come across as a woman in charge when I sit down with Ronan. Yeah. That's a better plan.
"Is that a yes or no?" I demand.
I hear him breathing. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes."
Click.
The Woozy Tiger is dim on purpose. It's a classic New York City corner bar, mostly for the locals, quaint and subdued and unpretentious. Not the kind of place where lives change, typically, but it felt like a safe space for this conversation.
Ronan is already there when I arrive. He's still in the shirtsleeves from this afternoon, no tie, the collar open one more button than it was in his office. He rises from the corner booth when I arrive, but I wave him right back down.
"None of that," I say. "I don't have the bandwidth to deal with all your confusing signals right now."
To his credit, he doesn't smile. He just looks at me with those churning eyes, as patient and open as ever. Goddammit, I hate that he's a good listener. It's making me feel like he's a safe shoulder to cry on, even though I know for a fact he is not that.
"You sounded concerned on the phone," he prods gently.
"That's a word for it," I choke out.
"Tell me what's happening."
So I pull up the notification on my phone and slide it across the sticky tabletop to him.
Ronan reads. He doesn't rush. He scrolls with one finger, slow and unhurried, his jaw working slightly, and I watch his face for the thing that's been driving me crazy since I met him—the flicker underneath the surface.
But there's nothing. He's smooth as brushed steel.
"It's Todd," I blurt out when I can't stand the silence. "It has to be. You said it yourself. They lose, then they regroup."
"They do." He sets the phone down and turns it face-up so the screen glows between us. "This is regrouping."
"So what do I do?"
"Nothing," he says. "You do nothing. I do everything."
"That's not—" I press my thumbs into my eyes. "That's the opposite of what I came here for. I came here so you could tell me how to fix it myself. So I could go home and open a spreadsheet and be competent and not feel like a—like a—"
"Like a victim," he finishes.
I drop my hands. "Yeah. That."
"You're not." He touches my wrist, just once, then withdraws.
"This battle is a long way from over. It's merely a motion, and motions can be answered.
Answered, then dismantled." He takes a slow breath.
"And frankly, this is amateur work, Ms. Meadows.
I don't think we'll have an issue fighting back. "
The knot of fear loosens in my chest. Just a notch. Just enough.
"You can stop it?"
"I can." He's so full of such endless confidence. If scientists found a way to hook up some jumper cables to him, he could power the known universe forever. I find myself leaning toward him, relying on him.
A very dangerous place to be.
Worse yet is the fact that I believe him.
Not because he's charming—he is, of course, though in a very different way than Todd. It's because he simply is what he is, unapologetically. There's not an ounce of liar in him.
"Give me a minute," he says, sliding off the stool. "I need to make some calls."
"On our date?" I joke weakly. "Kinda rude, Mr. Akov."
He smiles. "The window on responding to something like this is short, and the people I need are the sort who prefer to be woken up rather than caught flat-footed.
" He touches my shoulder—just barely, two fingers, gone before I can decide how I feel about it—and heads for the door. "Don't move. Don't leave."
I roll my eyes. "If you ask nicely, I might even shake and roll over."
"Oh, I'm sure you're full of useful tricks," he agrees with a laugh. Then he steps out onto the street with his phone at his ear.
I sit there and stare at my water, trying to feel like a woman in charge. I do a pretty decent job of it for about ninety seconds.
Then a glass appears in front of me.
"From the gentleman over there," the bartender says. He tips his head toward the far end of the bar, where a guy in a quarter-zip and expensive sneakers lifts his own drink at me with a flirtatious smile.
The drink is a dirty martini. I'm briefly annoyed that he correctly guessed my preferred intoxicant.
"Oh," I say. "No. Thank you, but no."
"He's already paid for it," the bartender says with a shrug. "I can pour it out if you want, but I'm guessing he'll want to... Yeah. I'll let you handle it."
The bartender scurries away like a coward as Quarter-Zip ambles over. He's swaggering and supremely confident, three-quarters buzzed. Vaguely handsome, though far too Todd-ish for me to ever even give him the time of day.
I brace myself. I have exactly enough energy left after the day I've had to be polite for maybe four seconds before I say something rather rude.
"You're a pretty young thing," he blurts out.
I do a stunned double-take. I was raised to believe that Hello, My Name Is ____ is a better standard greeting, but maybe things have changed since I was last on the dating market.
"Love a woman with curves," he adds, as if he hadn't already dug his own grave deep enough.
I open my mouth to tell him that he really shouldn't be getting his hopes up.
But I don't get the chance.
The door opens. Ronan comes back in with his phone in his hand and takes in the whole tableau in one sweep—the martini, the empty stool where Quarter-Zip's drink used to be, and the man himself, three steps into his approach.
His face doesn't change at all.
But the air in the room goes molten.
Quarter-Zip is still blabbering, though I'm no longer listening. I watch Ronan walk not to me but to the bartender. He bends forward and says something low that I can't hear.
Then he takes out his wallet.
I don't know what he says. I don't know what number he names or what he puts on the bar, but whatever it is, the bartender's eyebrows climb toward his hairline and then he nods, once, crisp, and reaches under the counter, and the music cuts, and the lights come up two notches.
He clears his throat and announces to the twelve or fifteen people scattered around the Woozy Tiger that the bar is closing early tonight, drinks are on the house on the way out, thank you, goodnight, mind the step.
There's grumbling. The scrape of stools. Quarter-Zip stands in the middle of it with his martini plan in ruins, looking from Ronan to me and back.
Then Quarter-Zip makes a very catastrophic choice.
He tries to put a hand on me.
I don't even see Ronan cross the room. I'm mostly focused on the man's hand as it comes closer and closer, and then, out of nowhere, a familiar blur inserts himself between us just before it lands.
I look up in shock. Ronan's back is to me, his shoulders wide enough to blot out the room, and his cologne is rich in my nose. He leans in close to the man's ear. His mouth barely moves.