Chapter Four
Sterling
I don’t bluff. I make decisions and hold them. The people across the table either meet me where I am or they don’t, and the ones who don’t find out what it costs.
The board meets at two. The Prescott close is a win, and the room knows it.
I let them know without saying so, because telling a board you won is the quickest way to make them wonder what you lost. The quarterly numbers go up.
Gil Halloran objects to the real estate allocation, as he always does.
He wants a different framework, and he’s half-right, which is more than most people manage when they push back on me.
“Your downside model assumes a six-month correction,” Halloran says.
“I think you’re optimistic by a quarter.
” He doesn’t soften it. He doesn’t pad it with compliments first. Gil talks like a structural engineer about load-bearing walls.
The math is either right or the building falls down, and your feelings about it are irrelevant.
I take one of his points, explain why the other doesn’t hold, and we move on.
I like Halloran because he’s not afraid to challenge me, and he’s right sometimes.
After the vote, Martin Yoon puts a document in front of me. It’s a trust administration item, routine, requiring either a signature from the primary trustee or a formal waiver. The primary trustee is Richard Hollingsford. The signature line has been blank for seven years.
I don’t touch the document. I pick up the quarterly report Martin set down before it and align it with the edge of the table, then do the same with the folder beneath it. “Handle it.”
“Sterling...” Martin says my name the same as he always does when this document is on the table, quietly, with careful patience. He knows pushing me toward this door only makes me lock it harder.
“Handle it, Martin.”
He takes the document back. He has handled it nine times before.
He’ll handle it nine times more. We don’t discuss what the document contains, who it requires, or why the signature line stays empty, because Martin Yoon is my attorney and my friend, and he knows when to stop pushing so he can remain both.
The board clears out by four. I check my phone in the elevator, which is the first time I’ve checked it since nine this morning, and I’d like to pretend it’s because I’m disciplined, sharp, and the Prescott close demanded my full attention.
The truth is, I’ve checked my phone too many times today before the meeting. Casey texted at 7:02 this morning to tell me she picked up a Thursday shift for Marnie and can’t do dinner. That was the whole message. No apology, no alternative, and no follow-up. She told me the fact and moved on.
It’s our fourth week. I’ve taken her to dinner three times.
She has taken me to Sal’s twice. I’ve kissed her exactly once, last Tuesday, in the parking garage at her hospital, 7 a.m., under fluorescent lighting that made us both look terrible.
I’d driven there after a board call that ran until three a.m., slept three hours, and showed up with coffee because I’d learned she takes hers black with one sugar, and the hospital’s coffee is dreadful. I know from personal experience.
She came through the stairwell door still in scrubs, badge clipped to her chest, keys already in her hand. She looked exhausted, irritated, and like someone who’d spent twelve hours keeping strangers alive and wanted nothing more than her car and her bed.
“You’re here,” she’d said. Not a question. An observation, the kind she makes when she’s too tired to dress it up.
“I brought coffee.”
“You drove forty minutes to bring me coffee?” She’d frowned as though unsure if she was pleased by that or irked.
“I drove forty minutes because you mentioned yesterday that the vending machine on three has been broken since Friday, and nobody’s fixed it. The coffee was the excuse.”
She took the cup with a tired smile and drank from it without checking what was in it, which meant she trusted me to get it right, and I had.
She’d leaned against her Corolla with the cup in one hand and her keys in the other, and she’d looked at me like she was trying to figure out what doesn’t add up. “Sterling.”
“Casey.”
She shook her head. “You can’t keep doing this.”
I had frowned in confusion. “Doing what?”
“Showing up. Learning my coffee order. Remembering that the vending machine is broken.” She took another sip. “It’s making it very hard to keep you in the category I put you in.”
I’d flashed her a grin. “What category is that?”
“Temporary.” She’d said it like she’d already lost the battle.
I had stepped closer. She didn’t step back. The fluorescent light was terrible for our appearances, and the parking garage smelled like exhaust, but none of it mattered because she was looking at me with those brown eyes and not stepping back.
I kissed her. She kissed me back with one hand still holding her keys and her badge still clipped to her scrubs. It was brief, warm, and tasted like the coffee I brought her.
When it was over, she’d put her hand on my chest and pushed me back exactly six inches. “Go home and sleep. You look like you haven’t.”
“I haven’t.”
“I know. Go home.” She got in her Corolla and drove away. She didn’t look back, but she took the coffee, and the impression of her lips stayed on mine for several minutes.
I’d stood in a hospital parking garage at 7 a.m. watching her taillights disappear around the second level and realized I was in serious trouble.
Not the kind of trouble I’m good at, that involves contracts, leverage, and the firm mathematical certainty that I’ll win.
The kind I have no training for. The kind where the other person can walk away at any point, and I have no clause, no term sheet, and no recourse except being the sort of man she doesn’t want to walk away from.
I’m twenty-nine years old. I run a company that manages four billion dollars in assets.
I closed the Prescott acquisition in eleven minutes this morning.
I’m standing in an elevator checking my phone, devastated because a woman I’ve kissed once is covering a shift for a friend and didn’t offer to reschedule.
Dana Whitlock catches me on the way out and needs fifteen minutes on the Singapore exposure, which I give her. Dana’s competence is so thorough it makes everyone around her both better and slightly annoyed. I trust Dana with the machinery. I don’t trust many people with much.
SHE RESCHEDULES LATER that day, inviting me over for a meal at her place. That’s a significant step, and I don’t hesitate.
Casey’s apartment is on the second floor of a building in Elizabeth, where the stairs creak, and the mailboxes look like they have combination locks that stick. The fifth time she lets me in, she’s cooking.
Cooking is generous. She’s heating things in pans and hoping for the best. The results aren’t good, but she doesn’t apologize for them when she sets the plate of...something before me. I think it’s a type of pasta.
“I should warn you, I’ve never successfully made anything that required more than four ingredients. This has five. We’re in uncharted territory.”
I laugh. “It has character.”
“It has too much garlic. You can say it has too much garlic.”
I take a cautious bite and chew mechanically. It’s awful, but the thought counts. “I agree, it has too much garlic.”
She smiles. “Thank you. I respect honesty in a man who’s eating my food.
” She takes a bite and makes a face that confirms her own review.
“My mother was a great cook. I was supposed to learn from her but kept volunteering for extra lab hours instead. She died before I got around to it, so now I eat like this and pretend it’s a choice. ”
She says it plainly, without stumbling over the grief underneath or waiting for me to navigate it.
Her mother’s photograph is on the refrigerator, held by a magnet from a beach she’s never mentioned.
The woman has Casey’s jaw but brownish hair instead of dark red, and a smile that looks like it came easily.
I realize the apartment is small, with two rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with a window that faces the building next door. Books are stacked on every flat surface, not for display. The spines cracked and covers bent. Nothing here was chosen to impress anyone.
“Tell me about your shift,” I say, because she’ll talk about work when she won’t talk about anything else.
“A kid came in with a rash. The parents were convinced it was meningitis. Turned out to be an allergic reaction to a new laundry detergent.”
I nod. “That’s a good outcome. How long did you sit with them?”
“Until the labs came back. About forty minutes. It was a slower night.” She shrugs. “The mom was shaking. You don’t leave someone shaking alone in a patient’s room.”
I sit at her table, eat pasta-something that has too much garlic, and drink wine that cost eight dollars. Casey lives in a two-room apartment, drives a car with a check-engine light, and has never once asked me what I do all day or how much it pays.
Her apartment is clean enough, and the gap between clean enough and perfect doesn’t bother her.
There are a stack of nursing journals on the coffee table with Post-it flags sticking out of them and running shoes by the door that have seen actual miles.
The couch has a blanket folded over one arm that she probably sits under when she reads.
I know this because there’s a dent in the cushion and a lamp angled toward it, along with three books on the closest table.
I’m collecting details about a woman’s living room as though they’re clauses in a contract, but I don’t know how to stop.
“Your pasta is getting cold,” she says from across the table.
“The pasta was never hot.” I grin. “The pasta achieved lukewarm and plateaued.”
“That’s fair. Next time, I’ll order in and pretend I cooked it.”
“I’d see through that if your cooking improved that much.”
“You’d eat it anyway.” She points her fork at me. “You’re eating this. You know exactly what this is, and you haven’t complained once. That either makes you polite or a liar, and I don’t think you’re polite.”
I hold up my hands. “I’m very polite.”
“You told a woman at the dry cleaners last week that her receipt system was a liability. You told me about it like it was a public service.”
I wince. “It was a public service. She was storing credit card numbers in a binder.”
Casey gives a surprised laugh that’s real, not careful or polite. It’s just a sound that comes out before she can decide whether she meant to make it.
She picks up the plates when we’re done. We both managed about half a plate. “I can’t do Saturday,” she says over her shoulder, rinsing them in the sink. “I’m covering for Marnie again. She owes me two already, but her kid has a thing at school, and I told her I’d take it.”
She doesn’t offer to reschedule or express regret. She tells me and moves on to the next plate. I’d do the same if I had a meeting that ran long or an unexpected event come up, so I respect her forthrightness and not feeing the need to apologize for doing her job.
I sit at her kitchen table with a fork still in my hand as it strikes me mercilessly and without warning that Casey Weaver would survive losing me.
She’d be sad. She’d miss me on her nights off, at Sal’s on Fridays, and in the parking garage at seven in the morning.
She’d miss me, but then she’d work her next shift, buy her own groceries, pay her own rent, and keep driving the Corolla until the check-engine light either went away or didn’t. She’d be fine.
I wouldn’t survive losing her. I know this with a certainty that sits in the body, not the head.
I’d function. The firm would continue. I’d close acquisitions, run board meetings, and Martin would put documents in front of me that I wouldn’t touch.
I’d do all of it, but none of it would matter.
The difference between functioning and surviving is the entire width of my life.
I don’t say any of this. I say Sunday works.
“Sunday works,” she agrees. She dries her hands on a towel with a faded strawberry print that probably belonged to her mother and smiles at me like I’ve passed a test she didn’t tell me she was giving.
I leave at ten because she has a shift in the morning.
I already know she won’t let me stay, so I don’t try to insist or finagle.
Pushing Casey produces the exact opposite of what you intended.
She walks me to the door, kisses me briefly but with banked passion, tells me to drive safely, and closes the door behind me before I can turn the kiss into something longer.
In my car outside her building, I don’t drive away.
The street is quiet. Her light comes on in the second-floor window.
I sit there, pick up my phone, put it down, and pick it up again.
I’m aware how pathetic this is, but I stay there for several minutes watching the light before I text her the photograph I took of dinner.
The pasta in the mismatched bowl, the garlic bread she burned on one side, and the eight-dollar wine in a glass with a chip in the rim.
I send it without a caption because the photograph says everything I can’t.
Her reply comes almost immediately. A single word I can’t print and a laughing emoji. I sit in my car laughing alone at a text about burned garlic bread.
Then I stop laughing, because I’ve never been this frightened of anything in my life, and frightened isn’t a word I use.
I’m using it now, in a parked car on a quiet street in Elizabeth, about a woman who doesn’t need me.
I should leave, but I stay until her bedroom light goes out.
Only then do I finally drive home alone when all I want to do is be in that room with her.