Chapter 4
Chapter Four
M ax opened his door to a stiff and irate Sloane. In response, he experienced an immediate rush of happiness.
Her clothing was as prissy and formal as ever. He had motion-sensor cameras mounted on the exterior of his house and so he knew that she’d only left the property in the Suburban twice today. She’d likely spent the rest of her day working inside the apartment. Even so, she was dressed like she was on her way to a baby shower. A white fabric headband that tied in a knot on top held back her hair with obedient precision. Her makeup didn’t have a single smudge.
However, if she’d been a cartoon character, she’d have had steam coming out of her ears and eyebrows slashing down at the center. Take the prissy clothing and the cartoon anger, stir them up, and looking at Sloane in this moment was like looking at a furious teacup poodle.
Highly entertaining.
“I have no water,” she stated, “at the apartment.”
“Please come in.”
“Is the resumption of water contingent on me coming inside?”
“It absolutely is.”
She entered with the dignity of a queen on the way to her own beheading.
He led her past the staircase on one side and the formal dining room on the other. “May I get you something to drink or eat?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Care to sit?” He motioned to the den.
“No.”
He’d overseen a major renovation and now his house had the feel of an art gallery—wood floors, white walls, paintings illuminated by their own individual lights.
Because she’d turned down food, drink, and a chair, they were facing each other in the no-man’s-land between the kitchen, den, and back porch. Which felt like a metaphor for the no-man’s-land location of what had once been their partnership.
“In case you’re unaware,” Sloane said, “landlords are required by Maine law to provide running water.”
“Seeing as how you’ve only been without running water for twenty minutes, I don’t think you’ll have success charging me with uninhabitable living conditions.”
“Without water,” she went on as if he’d said nothing, “we’ll dehydrate and die. Is that what you’d like to happen to Ivy and me?”
He made a show of contemplating that. “Not to Ivy.”
She scowled, again reminding him of the teacup poodle.
“What needs to happen in order for you to turn our water back on?” she asked.
“I’ve already told you what I want. You moved in on Monday. It’s Friday. I still have no closure.”
She straightened. “If you have questions for me, ask them.”
He held her eye contact steadily, knowing he could win any staring contest she was willing to offer. “I want your version of what happened four years ago.”
She went to cross her arms, then stopped herself. No doubt crossed arms weren’t good etiquette. She settled on clasping her hands in front of her waist.
“Well?” he prodded.
“Since you’re the one who wants to rehash all of this, why don’t you tell your version of what happened, and I’ll interject my version when applicable?”
“Four years ago,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Libri was struggling.”
Their final year of college they’d taken an entrepreneurship class that had tasked them with creating a business plan for a brand-new company.
Sloane, an avid childhood reader, had suggested they build a company that would function as a digital library to the entire English-speaking world. For a reasonable monthly fee, subscribers would receive unlimited access to ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers, sheet music, and podcasts. It would be affordable because Sloane knew from personal experience that a tremendous number of people didn’t have much money to spend on those items. And it would be convenient—all content immediately accessible via phones, tablets, and computers.
Max had caught her vision. They’d named their company Libri, the plural form of the Latin word liber for “book.” By the time they’d completed college, both of them in caps and gowns receiving their diplomas during the same graduation ceremony, Libri had become a passion for them, and they’d committed to making it a reality.
They stayed in Philadelphia, each working at full-time, entry-level jobs during the week and working on Libri the rest of the time. They received $110,000 in seed funding from a venture capitalist. Nine months later, they’d raised one and a half million from two other VC groups, at which time they quit their day jobs.
They’d rolled almost every dime Libri made back into the company—investing in additional employees, in tech, in marketing. They’d worked intense hours and battled obstacle after obstacle as they’d sought to enter into deals with the “big five” publishing companies. It had been an uphill slog. Many times the two of them had inched Libri forward out of nothing but sheer, stubborn persistence.
“The business was at an inflection point,” he went on. “The annual general meeting that year was arguably the most important AGM we’d had. Three weeks before, I was preparing for it, you were preparing for it. And then, overnight, you changed. Your body was still present at the office some of the time, but it was like the rest of you was MIA. For the first time ever, your work slipped. You started dropping responsibilities. When I asked you what was happening, you said ‘family issues.’ That was it. That was all you told me.”
He paused. When she didn’t contradict him or add anything, he continued. “I offered to take your presentation at the AGM off your plate. I told you that the rest of the team would pick up the slack for you. But for three weeks you insisted, repeatedly, that you were fine. That you’d present as usual at the AGM.”
She inclined her chin, agreeing with the facts he’d laid out so far.
“Twenty minutes before your presentation, the board of directors, the auditors, and the shareholders were arriving. I get a text from you saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’ Five words. I tried to call you, over and over, but you wouldn’t answer. Time ran out and I was forced to go up and present in your place. I looked like an idiot in front of some of the most powerful people in the Northeast. I was uninformed, disorganized, unprepared. It was the worst day in the history of my career and as soon as it ended, I drove to your apartment.”
“If you recall,” Sloane said tightly, “when you got there, I immediately tried to apologize to you. You ignored my apology. You didn’t want to hear anything except your own ranting. How could I sabotage you like that? How could I tank our company? And on and on. You were furious.”
“Yes. I was furious. Justifiably.”
“I’d committed an unforgivable sin when I hurt your pride by making you give that presentation.”
“No,” he responded flatly. “It was later that you committed the unforgivable sin.”
“And later still that you did the same to me.”
“You kicked me out of your apartment”—Max returned to the sequence of events—“and the next morning at work Nate tells me your sister died. That was the family issue you’d been dealing with for three weeks. Harper had died . Of an overdose. He tells me that your grief has been terrible and explains that immediately before the presentation you had a panic attack. Which is why you couldn’t do it. I had to hear all of this very important, very relevant information about what had been going on with my business partner from Nate. One of our coders knew about Harper’s death and I did not.”
“Nate was my boyfriend at the time.”
Max’s temper spiked. “You’d known Nate for how long? Five minutes? Nate had the significance of a gnat compared to me. I’d spent nine years earning the right to be at the top of the list of people who mattered to you. As your partner and friend, you should have told me about Harper’s death miles before you told Nate.”
“I’m private when it comes to my family.”
“That explanation isn’t good enough.”
“It’s going to have to be.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Sloane?” he demanded.
She drew her shoulders back. “I’m private when it comes to my family,” she said again with steely calm. “I didn’t tell you about Harper because I wanted my personal life to remain separate from my professional life. I told myself I could keep my grief from crossing over and affecting Libri. Unfortunately for me, I was wrong about that . . . as the panic attack proved.”
“If I’d known you were grieving your sister, I would have handled everything differently.”
Her brown eyes narrowed. “That statement in no way exonerates you in my eyes.”
It seemed he’d gotten a little spoiled. These days, almost no one stood up to him the way she was doing now. He’d become accustomed to telling people what to do and receiving little pushback.
But here was Sloane, jutting her delicate chin and pushing back hard. A part of him didn’t like it at all. Another part of him relished it. That part of him was saying finally and causing all his synapses to fire.
“The argument at your apartment was the last time we spoke,” Max said. “So, to this day, I’ve never heard what was going through your head during those weeks between Harper’s death and the AGM. I want to hear it now.”
“That won’t help anything at this point?—”
“Closure.” He gave her a look like, Tell me .
Every inch of her communicated reluctance. He worried she’d storm away. But instead, she shifted position. Feet side by side, she straightened one arm and clasped the elbow of that arm with her other hand. It was the type of pose only used by royalty and celebrities on the red carpet. He knew her well enough to know that she employed etiquette as armor. This ladylike pose was her chain mail.
“Harper’s death devastated me,” she said. “Even more than I realized at the time. I survived the days following her overdose by focusing on the things that needed to be done . . . choosing a casket, flowers, a cemetery. Organizing the funeral service. We buried her on a Sunday, and I was back at my desk on Monday. Since our senior year, Libri had been my passion. It had consumed every empty space in my life, and I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked it that way. I had more than enough energy and love to give it. But after Harper died, something shifted.” She looked toward the windows. Light slid along her cheekbone and neck.
He waited.
“All of a sudden, I didn’t have any gas left in my tank. Grief was a physical thing for me.” She turned her face back to him. “During those weeks leading up to the AGM it felt like I was living with a heavy blanket weighing me down. I believed that if I could press through the sadness, things would return to normal, and I was desperate for things to return to normal. So I held on to Libri like a life preserver—which is why I didn’t let you take responsibilities off my plate. Some days I felt slightly better, like the old Sloane, the one who had a sister. Other days I felt blue. On the worst days, my life seemed pointless.”
Max focused wholly on her. A helicopter could have crashed to the earth outside and he wouldn’t have glanced its way.
“The morning of the AGM, I woke up consumed with anxiety. I reassured myself that it was okay, that I could and would give the presentation. I dressed. I had all my materials ready. But the anxiety kept mounting and mounting. Eventually my attempts to overcome it failed and a full-fledged panic attack set in. My heart was thundering, and I was gasping for breath. I had this out-of-body moment when I thought, I can’t do this. I literally cannot give this presentation. Which is when I texted you.”
His mouth formed a thin line.
“When you arrived at my apartment, I was weak and shaky and overwhelmed with guilt about leaving you in the lurch the way I had. But then you immediately came at me with fury, which I’d never been less prepared to handle.” She blew out a slow exhale. “In response, I went into self-preservation mode. It was all too painful and too stressful, and I knew I couldn’t deal with you anymore. So I forced you to go and then I packed a suitcase and got in my car. I drove aimlessly. Slept in a hotel that night. Drove aimlessly the next day. Slept in another hotel. Then found an inn in North Carolina with several tiny cabins spread out in the forest. I stayed in one of them for the next month.”
Max was not the type to let emotion sit in the driver’s seat and take the wheel of his life. Now that something that might be remorse was twisting inside him, he recalled why he didn’t let emotion sit in the driver’s seat. He hated how this felt. He shoved remorse aside and kept a tight grip on his anger. “After Nate explained what was going on, I was determined to get you, me, and Libri back on course. I tried everything to reach you.” He counted actions off on one hand. “I tried calling you. I tried texting you. I tried emailing you. I returned to your apartment, but you were gone, and no one would tell me how to get in touch with you or where to find you.”
“Like I said, I knew I couldn’t deal with you anymore.”
“Libri descended into chaos. No one was trained to do the things you did. I barely slept that month, trying to do my job and your job.”
She tilted her head. “You can’t seriously expect my pity. Can you?”
“I went to your dad, but he had no idea where you were. Then I went to Brooke and Jared. Brooke wouldn’t tell me anything, but as Jared was walking me out to my car, he said that Titan had made you an offer to buy your shares in Libri. And that you were considering selling.” A visceral memory of that night came to him—the blindsided betrayal he’d experienced at Jared’s words. Sloane owned twenty percent of Libri. Max owned twenty. Their investors owned the rest. “I was ready to believe that Jared, who’d always been a decent guy, had turned into a lunatic and a liar. Because that seemed more plausible to me than the idea that you’d sell your stake to our biggest competitor.”
“None of what happened was Jared’s fault, yet he still hasn’t forgiven himself for telling you about Titan’s offer.” Sloane used a pinky finger to reposition a lock of hair. “Jared trusted you. He thought you had my best interests at heart, that the information about Titan would motivate you to find me and patch things up with me. He never imagined that the information would cause you to see me as a threat. Or that you’d sacrifice me because of it.”
“I saw you as a threat because you were a threat to me. Titan would have started with your twenty percent, then bought out other shareholders, until they had enough for a hostile takeover. Neither of us would have had a company then.” Max could hear bitterness creeping into his tone. That was too telling, so he checked himself and reverted to a detached tone. “Titan would have ripped Libri away from me. So, explain. Explain how you were willing to throw away the business we started.”
Silence bubbled between them like lava.
Accepting disappointment had never been easy for Max. But his disappointment in Sloane had been the most impossible to accept of them all.
“I answered the phone when Titan called me,” she said. “Of course I did. I wasn’t willing to throw Libri away, I was simply weighing my options because the number Titan offered for my stake was a bigger sum than I’d ever seen in my life. Any savvy businessperson would have done the same. Any savvy businessperson in that circumstance would have taken time to weigh their options.”
“Let’s be clear. You were weighing the option of handing our competitor the ammunition for a hostile takeover .”
“I was burned out at the time. Vulnerable.”
“Up until that point, I’d have sworn that my smart, trustworthy partner would never turn on Libri like that. No matter how burned out or vulnerable.”
“And I’d have sworn that my smart, trustworthy partner would never have turned on me the way that you did. I knew success was critically important to you. But I failed to realize that it was the only thing in the world you care about.”
“I’d invested six years of work into Libri?—”
“As had I. In the end, you didn’t find me and try to patch things up with me as Jared had expected. You didn’t even give me the autonomy to decide on Titan’s offer. Instead, you went to our shareholders. You made them afraid of me. Called for a vote. And had me removed.” She set her palm against her chest. “From Libri, the business that had begun as my idea. I’d put just as much blood, sweat, and tears into it as you had. But when you were done scheming, I had zero ownership.”
“You left me no choice.”
“Oh? Does telling yourself that help you sleep at night? I found out about what you’d done from Nate and returned home in a panic. I met with an attorney, who handed me a check for the valuation you and the other shareholders had determined my share was worth, which was less than Titan’s offer. The rest of you divided my shares and washed your hands of me. That’s how you ended things. That’s how you cut me out of Libri.”
“You left me no choice?—”
“My check from Libri was just enough to buy a little house and a little car in LA.” She sliced a hand through the air. “So then I’m out in California, going to therapy in an attempt to wrap my head around what you did to me, and starting a new small business from scratch. And while I’m grinding away at that, Libri is gaining traction, taking off, and becoming a winner.”
“Proving that selling to Titan would have been catastrophic.”
“You returned to Maine as a victorious prince and moved the headquarters here.” Her words were picking up pace and steam. “Libri is now a billion-dollar company, which means my share, was it still mine, would amount to two hundred million dollars . It’s laughable that you’re acting as though you’re entitled to closure from me when you should be down on your knees kissing my feet in gratitude.”
“Gratitude?”
“For creating a scenario that enabled you to evict me from my own company at a bargain basement price. Bravo, Max.”
He’d grown Libri into what it was today. He wouldn’t minimize the satisfaction of that. The satisfaction of that was enormous. However, the past four years had revealed that in winning his way with Libri, he’d lost something crucial.
Sloane.
“That was more than enough closure,” she stated, “to justify the resumption of water at the garage apartment.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Turn the water back on,” she ordered.
He wasn’t ready for her to go. But before he could think of something to say to keep her with him, the front door snapped closed behind her.
Sloane was still awake at 1:24 a.m., trying not to think about Max and the conversation they’d had earlier.
Why, she wondered, did giving him real estate in her head make her feel so wretched?
Perhaps because Max was forcing her to face the mistakes she’d made. She’d go to the grave insisting that Max’s sins toward her were worse than hers toward him. After all, only one of them had ended up as the super-rich CEO of Libri. And it wasn’t her, so she rested her case.
Nonetheless, she had made some foolish choices while sick with grief over her sister’s death. In going back over the events of four years ago, she couldn’t hide from those foolish choices. Or from her own fallibility. Or from regret.
No doubt giving Max real estate in her head also made her feel wretched because he was a living, breathing reminder of the things she’d once had. And didn’t have any longer.
She’d once had Libri. It had been more than a career. It had been her dream, the work she loved, her community. Most of her friends back then had been co-workers, all of them rowing in sync toward the same goals.
Because of Libri, she’d once had a reason to live in this corner of the United States—the East Coast region where she’d been born and raised.
And because of Libri, she’d once had Max as her partner. He was a formidable enemy, but he’d been an even more formidable ally.
When they’d first become friends in college, he’d been more ruthless, less emotionally available, and more smoothly charming than she. But they’d both been college kids determined to better themselves and their prospects in life. She’d understood what made him tick and vice versa. She’d appreciated his sense of humor, his smarts, his work ethic.
Almost every college girl she’d known had been infatuated with him because of his looks. But she’d always had a window past his looks to the person beneath. And for a long, long time she’d liked the person beneath a great deal.
Perhaps even sweeter than her appreciation of him, though, had been his appreciation of her . Max had never said, “Our friendship means the world to me.” Even so, his actions had convinced her of that very thing.
He’d shown up for her. He’d prioritized her. Whenever she communicated with him for any reason important or unimportant, she heard back from him right away. If they planned to do something together and his guy friends or his girlfriend-of-the-month made plans the same night, he always chose her.
She and Max did the lousy jobs no one but true friends were willing to do—like moving each other into and out of college apartments, driving the other home to Maine, sitting through boring ceremonies during which one of them received a recognition. If either of them got sick, the other delivered prescriptions and Gatorade and food.
Once, during the winter of her senior year, she’d gone to a frat party with a friend. Her friend had snuck off with a boy and Sloane had suddenly found herself alone and outnumbered. One drunk boy in particular kept insisting she dance with him. Not wanting to trudge at night through the ice and snow back to her apartment, she’d texted Max to ask if he could give her a ride. Within minutes, he’d arrived, put his arm protectively around her shoulders, and steered her out of there. When the drunk boy had tried to block their retreat, Max had shoved him roughly to the side.
It had been heady, the favored status he’d granted her.
Sloane knew and accepted that she was not extraordinarily beautiful. Nor extraordinarily special.
In terms of weaknesses—she’d been abandoned by her mother and neglected by her father. She’d come from a poor family. Those hardships had been the sewing machine that stitched her together in the sturdiest of ways.
In terms of strengths—she was intelligent and industrious. Mannerly and gracious. A faithful aunt to Ivy. She had integrity. Though her brand of determination was more composed than Max’s brand of determination, they were equals in that respect.
Somehow . . . way back at Penn, handsome Max Cirillo—the illegitimate son of famous and wealthy Felix Camden—had seen who Sloane was and had valued her greatly. Knowing she had Max so staunchly in her corner . . .
Well.
Once upon a time, that had been a powerful thing.
After graduation, in Libri’s early years, their role in one another’s lives had felt even more magnified. Perhaps that had been because Sloane had not had a serious boyfriend and Max had not taken any of his girlfriends seriously. He wouldn’t stoop to loving any of those women, so while the women had sometimes irritated Sloane, they’d never truly bothered her because they’d never truly threatened her?—
Wait. Was that the scritch-scratch of rat feet?
She jerked upright, listening.
No, it was raining. That was just the sound of rain.
Sloane socked her pillow, annoyed by her fear of rats, annoyed that she was awake at this hour, annoyed because now that she was being so honest with herself, she should admit something she did not like to admit. Namely that there had been a few forbidden and ill-advised moments across her years with Max when she’d found herself almost unbearably attracted to him.
She flopped onto her mattress face-up, limbs open like a starfish.
She’d been too wise to act on those wayward moments. Too unwilling to wreck her life, her company, and their friendship by falling for a man who ran through women like water.
It had been one such wayward moment that had motivated her to keep her personal life and professional life separate. A year before Harper’s death, she and Max had been working late in the boardroom, hunched over a spreadsheet. He’d stood and used a dry-erase marker to slash numbers across the whiteboard. She’d rushed to her feet and pulled the marker out of his hand.
Her intention had been to immediately begin using the marker herself, but all at once, she’d been caught in the crosshairs of his nearness and his masculine physicality. She’d been close enough to see the gradient of color in his irises and catch a whiff of the soap he used, which always made her think, This is what Greece must smell like . Ocean, trees, sun.
Time turned heavy as honey. He’d gazed at her with heat. And Sloane had longed for him.
She’d come back to her senses in time to save herself. But the near miss had frightened her. She’d determined that it was dangerous to be so chummy with Max Cirillo. Na?ve. Reckless. For all their sakes, for Libri’s sake, she needed to treat him less like her best friend and more like she treated the other male members of the board of directors—with the utmost professionalism. From that day forward, she’d put that into practice.
Which was why she hadn’t blurted out the truth to Max when Harper died. Why she hadn’t cried on his shoulder. Why she’d shut him out during her weeks at the cabin. All of which had ultimately resulted in him shutting her out of their company.
To her great frustration, her anger at Max hadn’t prevented her from dreaming of him from time to time the past four years. Whenever her subconscious turned traitor and allowed him to visit her in her sleep, it was to do things he’d never done in real life. To whisper words of love to her, to hold her, to kiss her.
In the name of all that was right and holy, she wished she didn’t feel Max’s magnetism.
But ridiculously, she still did.
Even after all this time.