15. Shayla #2
I read the email on my phone. My vision blurs, and I blink fast, twice, refusing to let a single drop fall in front of my team.
"How much? How much of his personal portfolio?"
The room goes quiet again. Tomás stops mid-pour, champagne fizzing over the lip of my one good wine glass—a gift from my mother that I've never used because I've been saving it for a moment that felt worthy.
Dev is the one who answers. He pulls up something on his phone, a Bloomberg terminal screenshot that someone texted him, and reads directly from it.
"As of close of business Friday, Tyler Cox liquidated approximately 1.
2 billion in personal offshore holdings, dissolved his family trust's investment arm, and leveraged his remaining equity in three subsidiary companies to acquire a sixty-one percent controlling stake in Cox Venture Partners.
" Dev looks up. "He already owned thirty-four percent.
He bought twenty-seven points from four separate board members who were actively trying to fire all of us. "
"One point two billion," Penny repeats, because apparently the number needs to exist in the room twice to feel real.
"With a B," Todd adds, unnecessarily.
I stand up. Sit back down. Stand up again. My bonnet is crooked and I don't fix it.
"That's not a business decision." I'm pacing now, five steps to the window, five steps back, which is the maximum my apartment allows. "No analyst on earth would sign off on that. He exposed himself to—the tax liability alone?—"
"Shayla." Ava cuts through my spiral. "Stop doing the math and hear what I'm telling you."
"I am hearing you."
"No, you're calculating. There's a difference.
" She stands, blocking my pacing route with her body.
"The man dismantled his own financial empire.
Not to save his company. Not to protect his market position.
He did it because you walked out that door and he couldn't stand the idea that your people would pay the price. "
My jaw locks. The muscles along the side of my neck go tight.
"The industry is losing its mind," Dev continues, scrolling. "Forbes ran a piece this morning calling it, quote, 'the most expensive act of corporate contrition in modern history.' The Wall Street Journal thinks he's having a breakdown. TechCrunch thinks he's a genius playing 4D chess."
"What do you think?" I ask. The question lands on the whole room.
Silence. Then Jess, who never talks in meetings, who writes her thoughts in Slack messages and lets her code speak, clears her throat from her spot on the floor where she's folded her long body against the wall.
"I think a man who guts his own fortune to protect a team he doesn't even manage isn't doing chess." Jess picks at the laces of her socks. "I think he's doing something else."
The word she doesn't say fills every square inch of my six-hundred-and-twelve-square-foot apartment.
I turn back to the window. Harlem is still loud. The car alarm stopped. A new song drifts up from someone's speaker—something slow, something with a bass line that vibrates in the glass. The woman I see doesn't look angry. I look terrified.
Because anger I know how to carry. I've been carrying it since I was nineteen and a professor told me my neural net design was "surprisingly sophisticated for someone of your background.
" Anger is a fuel source. Anger got me through three jobs and a cramped apartment and a codebase that changed the industry.
Anger walked me out of that glass tower with my spine straight.
But this? This specific, crushing weight behind my ribs that comes from realizing you were wrong about someone—not a little wrong, not partially wrong, but fundamentally, catastrophically wrong?
I don't have a function for that. No algorithm. No elegant solution.
The buzzer screams.
Everyone jumps. Tomás sloshes champagne on my floor.
I push the intercom. "Who is it?"
"Courier service. Delivery for Shayla Barnes."
Ava catches my eye. I buzz the lobby door open and listen to footsteps climb four flights because the elevator has been broken since Obama's first term. A knock—different from Ava's, a single formal rap.
I open the door. A man in a gray uniform holds a leather portfolio case, the kind law firms use for pricey documents. Embossed in the corner: the seal of West & Associates, Tyler's private legal counsel. Not Cox Venture Partners. Not the corporate team. His personal attorneys.
"Sign here, please."
I sign. He hands me the case and disappears down the stairs.
The leather is warm from being held. I carry it to the folding table and unzip it.
Inside: a single document, maybe forty pages, bound with a thick cotton stock cover.
A wax seal holds it closed, shoved deep into burgundy wax with an imprint I don't recognize—not the corporate logo. Something older. Personal.
My fingers rest on the seal.
Six people see me from various corners of my apartment. Nobody drinks. Nobody breathes.
"You want privacy?" Ava asks, reading me the way she always does.
I should say yes. Whatever this is, it's between me and him, and my team doesn't need to see the expression on my face when I find out what he did next.
But my hands won't break the seal.