3. It’s Not Me. It’s You.
3
It’s Not Me. It’s You.
ANDREW
From: Victor Lynch
To: Andrew Jones
Sent: October 25, 2:26 pm
Subject: none
Come see me when you have a minute.
Victor Lynch, Chief Financial Officer
B eing unexpectedly summoned to the CFO’s office on a Friday afternoon is never a good sign. As soon as I saw Vic’s email, I locked my screen and stood, stretching. I’d been in my closet of an office all day hunched over my keyboard, working on my latest financial model. It was a hairy one, likely to take another week or two of development before the next round of testing.
My office didn’t have a window—windows were for vice presidents, not quants—but I glanced across the hall, through the open door of Reva’s darkened office, to the view outside. Clouds covered the sky, and a few halfhearted raindrops hit the window.
Usually, my boss protected me from the executives. I remembered seeing Reva this morning before I went heads-down into my model. Maybe her kid had a volleyball match today, and she’d left early.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I trudged out my door and down the long hall toward Vic’s corner office. The markets in New York had been closed for over an hour, and the office’s atmosphere felt easy, relaxed. My coworkers leaned against desks or doorframes, chatting about weekend plans. Mei, the marketing VP, strode toward me, her laptop bag on her shoulder.
“Have a good weekend, Mei,” I said.
“You too.” She stopped. “I bet you’ve got some wild plans.” She waggled her eyebrows.
I chuckled at her joke. “Not really, unless you consider working on a model wild.” I’d never volunteer that I planned to spend Saturday recording a math video for kids and Sunday editing it. Most people at the bank frowned on my hobby.
She chuckled. “Working on a model.” She walked away.
“No! That’s not what—never mind.”
At the end of the hall, Vic’s door was open, and I leaned on the frame. “Hey, Vic. Is now a good time?”
He looked up from his screen, his forehead a stack of wrinkles all the way up to his bald crown. “Yes, yes, Jones, come in, and shut the door.”
Uh-oh. I shoved off the doorframe and plodded across the rug to Vic’s desk. I perched on the edge of one of his guest chairs.
“Reva left us this morning,” he said without preamble.
I blinked. My boss hadn’t said a word to me about leaving. “Left us? Is she okay?”
Vic’s bushy eyebrows lowered. “She went to another bank. Security walked her out.”
“Oh, shit.” I’d missed all the drama with my headphones on. I’d have to call her later.
“Oh, shit is right. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to recruit a VP of finance in San Francisco? We’re talking weeks, if not months. I need you to take on some of Reva’s responsibilities while we search.”
Reva’s responsibilities seemed to center on checking on me and the rest of the quants, reporting our progress to Vic, then urging us to speed up our model development because Vic wanted it faster. It sounded like a pain in the ass, but I was the dependable one, the one you could ask to pick up extra work. It had started way back in elementary school when I’d seen my brother do the opposite, always slacking, and I wanted to be the good example, the one who didn’t give my mother migraines.
I opened my mouth to say, sure, but that wasn’t what came out.
“Wait.” My mother’s disappointed expression flickered through my brain along with her reminder that my veal pen down the hall wasn’t an office befitting a Jones, regardless of how much I liked my job. “Are you considering internal candidates for the VP job?”
Vic raised his eyebrows. “We would if we had anyone qualified.”
Swallowing, I forced out the words. “What about me?”
“You?” He leaned back in his chair. “But you’re a quant.”
My jaw tightened. Sure, I often referred to myself as a quant, but I didn’t love it when others did. It was dismissive, like calculations were all I was capable of. “Who better to lead the financial engineering department than a financial engineer?”
He narrowed his eyes. “And you’re…” He waved his hand in a circle. “Flighty.”
I reared back. “Flighty? All I do is work.”
“You’ve got a side hustle. You don’t even try to hide it. People can see your face in those videos.”
Damn it. Mother had been right again. Still…
“The videos I make on the weekends are my business. They don’t affect my work.”
“Regardless, the perception is that you aren’t one hundred percent invested in the bank. It would help if you…”
I leaned forward. “If I?”
“If you looked more stable. Look at your brother, for example.”
“What about him?” I growled through gritted teeth. When we were kids, I’d had to cover for him when he’d accidentally set fire to the neighbors’ lawn with his trebuchet experiment and when he’d failed to hide his stash of weed on cleaning day. Now he’d turned the tables on me.
“No one took him seriously until he settled down. He married that consultant. Pretty, and boring as hell. Now he’s got a family, and he works hard. Everyone respects him. Last month, he charmed a hundred K out of the board of this bank for his foundation. Genius.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me I have to get married to advance.”
“I’m not telling you that.” Vic splayed his hands wide. “But this is a client-facing role. You can’t hide in your office all day, then party all night.”
“I hardly party all night.” Most nights, I fell asleep in front of a televised soccer game. Alone.
He snorted. “Then you’re doing bachelorhood wrong. Before I got married, I was out every night until the bars closed. I had my fair share of walks of shame.” He gazed into the middle distance for a long moment until he shook himself. “In this role, you’d be meeting with customers as a representative of the bank. All I’m saying is that you’d be an easier sell to executive leadership if you acted like a banker.”
All I did was work and make nerdy videos with my best friend. How could I have time to party even a quarter as hard as my brother had before he met his wife? Or as much as Vic had?
But if Vic did an external search, I’d never get Reva’s job. “What if I were seeing someone?”
Vic’s expression turned calculating. “Are you?”
“Ye-es.” I hated lying, especially at work.
“Someone appropriate?”
“Of course! She’s a paragon of stability.” If I was going to lie, I might as well go big.
“It’s serious?”
I went all in. “Very.”
I watched him mentally calculate the savings on an executive search firm, not to mention the time it would take to vet and interview external candidates. “We have a meeting with a client in two weeks. Bring her. If you’re still dating her at the bank’s New Year’s Eve party, we’ll talk. In the meantime, I’m assigning you two of Reva’s projects.”
I gusted out a breath. “Thanks, Vic. You won’t regret it, I promise.”
“Hmm.” His eyes flicked back to his screen. “I’m sending you the details on those projects. Review them by Monday.”
“On it, boss.” Sensing my dismissal, I stood. Reva had complained nonstop about Vic’s demands. No wonder she’d gone to a competitor. Still, it was my best chance at finally meeting the Jones family expectations. “Thanks again.”
A grunt was his only response.
O n my way out of the building a few hours later, my laptop felt heavier with the details of Reva’s projects loaded into it for review over the weekend. I stepped into the elevator thinking about how I had to do the Fibonacci video in one take, two max, if I had any hope of assimilating Reva’s projects by Monday morning.
“Hey, Andrew.” The soft voice came from the corner of the elevator.
“Winnie! Sorry, I didn’t see you.” I scanned her face. She’d gotten rid of the braids, and her hair was in one of those voluminous twist-outs now. Maybe that was what made her seem larger and more confident.
She chuckled. “What else is new?”
“Hey, I wasn’t that bad of a boyfriend, was I?”
She quirked her full lips. “Not until the end when I failed your test.”
“Test?” I remembered a vague sense of disappointment around our breakup, but I’d lost the details.
“Andrew.” She put her hands on her hips. “We dated for three months, and you never took me to meet your family. Once I figured out you went to your mother’s for brunch every Sunday, I made sure I was free in case you wanted to invite me. It wasn’t until I gave up and said I’d go out with friends one Sunday that you asked me. Then you said I wasn’t there when you needed me.”
“Oh.” I cringed. “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It got me into therapy, which was fantastic for me.”
Yikes, I’d sent her to therapy?
“Serves me right for dating a player,” she said.
“Me? A player?” First Mei and Vic, now Winnie?
“You dated, like, a dozen people in the three months before you asked me out.”
“I did?”
She rolled her eyes. “We called you Andrew the Appetizer. Because all you gave anyone was a taste.”
“You and I dated for three months. That was more than a taste.”
She smiled wryly. “That’s why it hurt so much when we broke up. I thought I was the exception.”
“I’m sorry. Again.” But talking with Winnie had given me an idea. “Hey, would you like to go out for drinks? We can catch up.” And I can ask if you’ll pretend to be my girlfriend until I get this promotion. It wouldn’t even be that much of a lie since we’d dated before.
“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think so. You see…” She held up her left hand and waggled her fingers. An enormous diamond sparkled on her ring finger.
“You’re engaged? Congratulations.”
The door opened on the ground floor, and I waved her out ahead of me.
She paused in the lobby. “Can I tell you something, Andrew?”
“Um, I guess?” I rubbed the back of my neck.
“Therapy helped me see our relationship in a new way.”
“It did?” My shoulders crept up to my ears. This couldn’t be good.
“Yeah. It wasn’t me. It was you.”
Uh-oh.
“You’re a nice guy, Andrew, but you never trusted me enough to let me in. I know how important your family is to you, and it was a huge red flag that I never met them.”
I set my hand on my chest, like I could protect my heart from the darts she was throwing at it. Family was the only safe space for me, and I rarely invited others into that sanctum. Especially not someone I’d dated for only three months. “Sorry?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s okay. I’m better now.”
I grinned even though it pained me. “Good for you, getting therapy.”
“Yeah. Especially since that’s how I met my fiancée.”
“He was another patient?”
Winnie’s eyes sparkled. “She was my therapist. She saw the real me and loved me for it. But don’t worry, I changed therapists.”
“I’m glad you’re happy.”
She laid a hand on my arm. “I hope you find happiness, too, Andrew.”
“Thanks.”
I watched her walk away. Who had time for happiness? I had to dig into Reva’s projects, catch up on my own work, plus record, edit, and post a video.
Then find someone to pretend to be my girlfriend.