Chapter 2 Luther
LUTHER
“Get rid of her, Dot.” I lean back in my chair, fingers steepled behind my head as Dot Harper stands in front of my desk looking like she’d love to throw the laptop she’s holding at my face.
“No.”
I sigh. “Dot, you can’t leverage your relationship with my parents—”
“Like I’d do that.” Her eyes flash. “But what I will do…is refuse to fire the best damn data analyst I’ve ever had.”
I exhale slowly. “She froze. In front of thirty employees.”
“She panicked,” Dot counters. “You caused that.”
My jaw tenses. I’m an executive, and my job is to ask questions. Her job is to answer them. How is her choking my fault?
“I asked her a basic—”
“You kept pushing her while she was already overwhelmed. You did that on purpose.” Dot gives me a withering look. “Not everyone thrives under pressure.”
I say nothing, just wait for her to finish whatever she intends to say.
“She has a stutter, Luther,” Dot adds, her voice steady. “It isn’t incompetence. It’s a speech disfluency. She works incredibly hard to manage it, and most days she does. Today just wasn’t one of them.”
A stutter. Not incompetence. She has an actual physiological issue, and I walked all over her?
But still….
“HelixSphere can’t afford analysts who fall apart in front of clients.”
Dot lets out a laugh so dry it sounds brittle. “Clients don’t care how the sausage is made. They care about accuracy. Anouk delivers that. Every. Single. Time.”
I walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the bay sparkling beyond the glass, and force myself to stay on course, despite Dot’s irritating habit of making me second-guess myself with calm, well-reasoned arguments.
I don’t like being corrected, and I especially don’t like being wrong. But I get the uneasy feeling that I am not correct in my assessment of Anouk Starling.
She stood apart from everyone in that conference room, like she was on the outside of a circle that everyone else knew how to stand in.
Her long, straight, soft brown hair caught the light. She let it fall over her shoulders like she was using her mane to shield herself from the world.
Her features are gentle. Soft.
I think she looks younger than she is. I’ll have to look up her HR file to confirm DOB.
Her eyes…now they are spectacular. Green. Startling so.
There’s a softness to her….
A weakness?
I noticed her almost instantly.
A lot of people in that conference room wore suits today because they were meeting with the new CEO… but not her.
Most of them will not dress so formally tomorrow onward because I showed up to the meeting in a pair of jeans and a dress shirt. Suits are pretentious, and I fucking hate a tie. I put on the C-suite uniform only when I have no choice.
She was in what one would call business casual.
A-line navy-blue skirt paired with a beige silk blouse that had ruffles and shit.
Her whole outfit was pulled together with a silk scarf around her neck.
Her beige shoes were sensible…but not ugly, as sometimes comfortable can be. Her feet are small. Dainty. As is she.
The truth is, she snagged my attention—no small accomplishment, given how many conference rooms I pass through and how many people I meet without ever really seeing them.
My reaction to her irked me a little, and maybe I was too hard on her because of it. Not that she didn’t give me cause.
Dot sighs loudly, and I turn to face her. “You want to impress your father? You want to prove you’re ready? That starts with you recognizing real talent instead of dismissing anything that doesn’t look like or talk like you.”
Dot can proselytize with the best of them, and before I can respond, she presses on.
“And since your father trusts me to guide you during this rotation, here’s my guidance—put Anouk Starling on the Novagene Global Optimization Project.”
I stare at her like she just asked me to wear a pink tutu to the next board meeting.
Is she out of her fucking mind?
My father is using that project to evaluate whether I can handle grant-level operations. He’s going to audit every decision I make on it.
“That’s a multimillion-dollar engagement and absolutely crucial for our business.”
Dot folds her arms. “Anouk is the only person in this company who can build a forecasting model accurate enough to stand up to Jacob Grant’s scrutiny.”
I stare at her like she’s grown two horns, because believing that would be easier. My father is notoriously hard to please—he can tear apart a model that’s ninety-nine percent right with surgical precision, all for the missing one percent.
“You…uh…you want me to involve her in the project where nearly thirty percent of our next year’s revenue hinges on?”
Dot meets my gaze head-on. “I want you to stop making assumptions about people who don’t think like you do. That includes neurodivergent people. Some minds see patterns and solutions your father’s analysts at corporate HQ wouldn’t dream of finding.”
Fucking hell, Dot, you do lay it on thick, don’t you?
My mouth presses into a hard line as I clamp my teeth together to prevent myself from saying something I will regret.
“What?” Dot prompts impatiently. “Just spit it out.”
“She can’t present. Or talk clearly.”
Dot levels me with a stare that feels like a scolding. “Diversity isn’t just about skin tone or nationality, Luther. It’s about how people think and how they process. It’s about how they communicate. You want innovation? Hire people who don’t speak the way your prep-school friends do.”
I look away, something uncomfortable stirring in my gut, something I’d like to ignore.
“You’re overestimating her,” I mutter.
“No.” Dot smiles smugly at me. “You’re underestimating her.”
“Jesus, Dot—”
“Fine, just let her build the base model, okay? Work with her. See the work. Not the panic.” She shakes her head as if she’s disappointed in me. “And then you can decide if you want her to present to your father and the board or not.”
“Let me think about it.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Erin walks in without waiting for my response.
Dot lets out a frustrated groan. “Your shadow is here.”
It’s obvious Dot doesn’t like Erin, which is fair—Erin doesn’t like her either.
Erin has complained enough about Dot and her team during the months she’s been here, supposedly helping prepare the company for me to take over.
Remarkably, Dot hasn’t complained once, even though I’ve given her plenty of opportunities.
Dot has a strict work-stays-at-work policy, so when I once asked her about business over dinner at my parents’ place, she glared at me like I’d been caught doing something deeply inappropriate. I felt like a teenager caught masturbating. And no, that’s not hyperbole.
Erin glances between us. “Should I come back?”
“We’re finished,” Dot retorts—though the warning in her voice suggests we’re anything but. She moves toward the door, then pauses and looks back at me. “Luther, you need to decide what kind of leader you want to be.”
When the door clicks shut behind her, Erin lifts a brow, amusement coloring her eyes.
“That looked intense.”
“She’s being dramatic.” I run a hand over my face because Dot, like my parents, has a way of riling me up, making me think, and do that hideous thing called self-reflection.
“She wants me to put Anouk on the Novagene project.”
Erin’s expression goes from amused to annoyed in an instant. “What?” she barks. “No! This is a project your father is going to personally review.”
“I know.”
“And Dot wants the”—she pauses, as if making an effort choosing her words carefully—“least client-ready analyst in the department to handle the modeling?”
Well, she certainly nailed that sentiment.
“She says Anouk is their best.”
Erin nods thoughtfully. “Technically speaking, she is good enough.” Then, after a beat, she adds, “But does that matter if she can’t function in a corporate environment?”
Dot’s words about diversity whispers in my mind’s ear, making my chest tighten.
“She froze,” Erin continues. “It happens, and it’s fine for an internal meeting, but not an external one.”
I want to be fair as a leader. Anouk shouldn’t have the chance to work on a major project just because she has a speech impairment, one she cannot control.
But I also want to live up to my father’s expectations.
He’s putting a lot of faith in me by sending me from company to company to learn the business. I don’t want to let him down.
“I know.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. I’m getting a fucking headache, and it’s day one.
Dad warned me that being CEO at HelixSphere would be my hardest role yet.
“Luther, this is the one that separates the men from the boys.”
“I know you know.” Erin smiles indulgently. “I can see it on your face, Luther. You want to look like the good guy for Dot.”
I roll my eyes, but she isn’t wrong. I want Dot to be impressed by me, not infuriated as she was, not disgusted as she was.
Damn it!
Erin shrugs. “Let her build the model behind the scenes. The team will review every step, so she won’t make mistakes. And when the time comes, I can present to Novagene and your father. She won’t jeopardize anything.”
Erin always frames things in ways that feel reasonable and professional.
“That’s a good plan,” I say. But the words are hardly out of my mouth, and I wonder if it indeed is a good plan.
I thought leadership meant taking over and charging ahead, running things the way I think best. But as I’m sitting here, doing the job instead of studying it, I’m learning—the hard damn way—that leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room, it’s about constantly interrogating yourself.
Your motives. Your assumptions. Your end goals.
It’s uncomfortable as hell—because questioning yourself means you have to confront the possibility that you were erroneous. That you misjudged someone and used your power in a way that did damage instead of good.
Erin smirks. “You can play the supportive boss until you’re ready to restructure her out. A performance issue. A communication gap. Something HR won’t go into a tizzy about.”
Is she saying that I have to fire Anouk?
Why?
If Anouk’s good at what she does, do we need to get her out of the company?
I want to correct her, push back, but I don’t.
“Fine,” I submit and watch her leave my office.
I trust Erin. She’s spent more time at HelixSphere than I have, and she knows the players. If she believes that Anouk Starling doesn’t have a place in the organization, then it behooves me to listen to her.
But it doesn’t sit well with me. In fact, I come away knowing I behaved like an asshole, because Anouk’s haunted expression keeps replaying in my mind—the way she folded inward when I snapped at her.
I can’t stop thinking about what Dot said.
See the work. Not the panic.
Diversity is also neurological.
Think about the kind of leader you want to be.
I want to shove the thoughts aside, but they don’t budge—maybe because my father and mother say similar things.
I’ve worked my ass off to prep for this role—the rotations, the leadership courses, the shadowing, the eighty-hour weeks, the endless feedback loops with my father’s board—and I walked into that conference room believing I was leading, showing strength.
But now there’s this knot in my chest I can’t ignore, an itch under my ribs because the truth is right there, simmering for me to face.
Today, I didn’t lead in that conference room.
I bulldozed.
I didn’t challenge Anouk—I made her nervous.
I didn’t empower my team. I made half of them shrink and the other half smirk.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She has a stutter, and I didn’t even bother to learn that.
I just walked all over her.
I thought decisiveness would inspire confidence in a new CEO. But here I am—expensive office, expensive education, expensive watch—fully aware that I’ve screwed up.
I was so busy showing off that I was ready to be a CEO that I misread the room and Anouk Starling, who, according to Dot, is the best analyst there is.
So, yeah, I’ll have her work on the Novagene project.
I’ll give her a chance.
I hope I won’t regret it.
I call Dot and tell her what I’ve decided, and ignore how smug she sounds when I do.