Chapter 20
Jude closed the door to the conference room, coming to join the rest of the founders. All our assistants were out of the room, as this meeting was top secret. “What’s going on?” he demanded, tugging up his sleeve to check his watch. “I’m due for a meet and greet in an hour.”
My hands felt shaky, so I curled them into fists under the table. “Jasper is not going to budge, which means...”
I left my sentence hanging in the air, but Quentin finished it for me. “It means he’s not selling to us and neither is Aleyna. So what are we going to do?”
Aaric tucked his long blond hair behind his ears and said, “What choice do we have? Maybe it’s the universe telling us it’s time to settle down.”
Cruz rolled his eyes. “His name is Simon, not the universe.” His eyebrows lifted. “Hey, it’s just a game of Simon Says. Simon says get married.”
Jude scowled at the lot of us. “So you’re all just giving up?”
“What are we supposed to do?” I countered.
“We could sell our shares and try building something new. We could wait until they get in and vote them out one by one, but we can only have a vote every year. That’s at least three years of them having access to proprietary information.
Forget ever going public with them in the picture. Investors wouldn’t trust us.”
Now Jude turned his frustration on me. “We’ve spent over a decade building this business, and now you want us to walk away?” Rei’s violin string assumption rang through my mind.
I pushed back from the desk and started pacing. “Of course I don’t want to walk away. It’s my life’s work.” Who was I without MyHome?
“We could become silent partners,” Aaric suggested. “Keep our shares and release our positions. Profit off the name we’ve built.”
But Quentin frowned. “Keeping our shares wouldn’t do us any financial favors long-term. And selling them before we step down would invite lawsuits, or even criminal charges, for insider trading.”
The five of us looked at each other for a long moment.
Jude folded his arms across his chest. “Five billionaires getting married within a year will look suspicious too.”
Cruz seemed confident as he said, “We just have to spin the right story and time it correctly. If we all married at the end of the year? Yes, that would seem off. If we got married throughout the year… it’s within the realm of possibility.”
“Marriage by a calendar?” I asked, skeptical.
If my dad were here, a vein would be popping on his forehead, and he’d have more than a few choice words to say.
But he wasn’t here. “How would we even decide who goes first?” I asked.
“Draw straws?” The concept seemed as ridiculous as Simon’s demand we get married.
“We need to be strategic.” Cruz stood up, going to the whiteboard at the front of the conference room and grabbing a marker. “If we want to craft a story, it needs to be believable. Jude will be the last—he’s known as a playboy. It will take a while for him to settle down.
The marker screeched as he uncapped it, then wrote a timeline on the board, crosshatched by months. After writing December, he added, “If Simon has eighteen months to live, this needs to be handled in a year to ensure he’s of sound mind to fulfill his promise, right?”
I watched as my co-founders nodded in agreement. A wave of surrealism washed over me. We were really doing this, weren’t we?
He marked a timeline, months one through twelve at the bottom.
“I travel so much for work that building a believable relationship will be a challenge. That puts me right before Jude.”
Aaric, Quentin and I looked at each other. That meant we were up first.
The idea of a marriage was starting to weigh on my shoulders like an anvil.
Cruz looked at me and said, “You were featured in Page Six on that date... Any chance something could go there?”
My stomach squirmed uncomfortably. The company was under siege. I’d taken risks before to get this company off the ground—asked family for money, cold-called for investors, stayed up late working only to get up early in the morning.
How far would I really go?
Could I disappoint my dad?
Could I marry for money?
Could I fail my friends?
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I can ask.”
Cruz nodded, putting my name under the three-month mark, right at December.
Three months? It was practically the blink of an eye.
But he was already moving on, looking between Quentin and Aaric. “Either of you have a secret relationship you’ve been hiding from us?”
Quentin didn’t answer that question, but he did say, “I’ll go next.”
Cruz nodded, scribbling Quentin’s name at the five-month mark and then Aaric at month seven, himself at nine, and Jude at the one-year mark.
For a moment, the only sound was the humming of fluorescent lights as we stared at the whiteboard.
Cruz capped the marker, dropping it into the silver tray under the whiteboard. “Is it worth it?” he asked us.
Jude said, “We need to stop asking that question.”
We all gazed at him, but I asked for an explanation out loud. “What question should we be asking then?”
He smirked. “How can we convince someone to marry your ass?”
“Oh, fuck off.” I balled up a yellow legal page and threw it at him.
As our chuckles died out, the air seemed to squeeze from the room, like a balloon left out in the cold overnight.
After a moment, I said, “We give it our all. And we succeed or fail, together. As brothers.” I looked around the table at the men I respected so much. This could be the end of MyHome as we knew it. The end of everything we’d spent more than a decade to build.
They each nodded in agreement, everyone echoing, “As brothers.”