Chapter 1 #2
I nod and open my laptop again. Logan Drake, tech CEO. Not warm. Not close with his brother. That is the full picture, and it’s enough — more than enough — for a resume submission that may lead nowhere.
Caleb has moved to the couch, phone in hand, and has begun telling me about a scheduling conflict on his current project — something about a director's cut timeline and a producer he finds difficult. I listen with one part of my attention and rebuild my resume with the other, adding the skills and transferable experiences that will translate best to a tech environment. By the time he’s finished, I have a stronger document than I started with and a clear sense of what I still need to research.
He stays for dinner. We order in. He makes me laugh twice over something that happened on set, and the evening settles into the comfortable, low-grade warmth that has characterized most of our time together — not electric, not particularly deep, but familiar in a way I have confused with contentment for longer than I would like to examine.
When he leaves just after ten, he kisses me at the door and tells me things will work out, and I believe him the way I believe weather forecasts — with measured confidence and no real certainty.
I go back to my laptop and work until midnight.
***
The following morning, Caleb texts while I am formatting the final version of my resume — a quick message, efficiently delivered, confirming he has made the call.
Caleb: Spoke to the hiring manager. Her name is Patricia. She's expecting your resume today. No guarantees but she said she'd take a look.
Sutton: Thank you. I appreciate you doing that.
Caleb: Of course. Let me know how it goes. Heading into set.
I write a cover letter that takes me forty-five minutes to get right, then I send the resume to the contact information Caleb forwards, and then put the entire thing in a mental folder I label pending and close.
I am not a person who waits well when waiting is the only available option, so I redirect the energy.
Drake Industries pulls up a clean, authoritative website — the kind that communicates competence without overselling.
Founded by the Drake family, current CEO Logan Drake at the helm for the past twelve years following his father's transition into a board role.
The company has divisions in infrastructure software, enterprise technology solutions, and an emerging AI development branch that is generating industry attention.
The LinkedIn profile attached to Logan's name is spare — a headshot in which he is not smiling–but I see the salt and pepper hair, the chiseled jawline and the piercing blue eyes. There are some facial similarities to Caleb’s own, but from the photo, it seems more defined.
Below the photo there is a list of credentials that reads like a catalogue of strategic decisions made over two decades, no personal information whatsoever.
There is nothing there that tells me who he is as a person, which may simply be who he is as a professional, or may be something else entirely.
I bookmark the company's career page. I research the tech sector the way I research everything — methodically, building from the broad architecture down to the specific details I will need to speak to the industry with credibility.
I take notes. I identify the gaps in my current knowledge and locate the resources to fill them.
***
The official last day at the office comes four days later.
They give us the morning to collect our things — a courtesy that feels both generous and slightly clinical, the way a hospital discharge feels when you're not entirely sure you're ready.
I arrive early, which is what I always do, and I stand at my desk for a moment before I start.
It's strange, the way a space can look exactly the same and mean something entirely different.
Same desk. Same monitor. Same view of the Los Angeles skyline doing its relentless impression of paradise.
But the context has dissolved, and without it the furniture is just furniture.
I pack efficiently. I don't have much — I've never been someone who personalizes a workspace heavily, some instinct in me always keeping a slight distance between myself and any place I'm not certain is permanent.
A small succulent on the corner of my desk that Jenna gave me when I started this job.
My Cleveland mug, the one with the skyline on it that I brought from home and that got me teased exactly once before people stopped noticing it.
A few books I'd wedged between my monitor and the wall.
My notebook, which goes in my bag before anything else.
Marcus stops by while I'm packing the mug.
He tells me I was always the sharpest person on the floor.
He says it with the kind of sincerity that arrives two years too late to mean what it could have, and I thank him for it genuinely anyway, because it costs nothing to be gracious and I'm not interested in carrying anyone's failures out of this building with me.
Sandra hugs me at the elevator. She tells me I'll land somewhere better and I believe her, not because she's saying it but because I intend to make it true.
The elevator doors close. I look at my reflection in the brushed steel and I don't look like someone whose professional life just got restructured without her permission. I look like someone with a list and a plan and a notebook full of research she hasn't started yet.
The doors open to the lobby. I walk out into the October sun and don't look back.
By the end of the first week I have read more about general enterprise technology than I have about anything in the past two years, and I find, with some surprise, that I am genuinely interested. Not performing interest — actually engaged.
However, the silence thus from Drake Industries does not particularly unsettle me.
I know how hiring pipelines work, and I'll take a look from a hiring manager is a long distance from a formal conversation.
I continue my research. I update my professional profiles.
I respond to two other inquiries from firms in Los Angeles, attend one interview that confirms immediately that the role is not what I am looking for, and decline a second one before it gets that far.
I know what I want. I have known for longer than I admitted, which is often how these things go.
My phone buzzes on the table and I grab it out of anticipation. However, it’s Jenna. Not a recruiter.
Jenna: Dinner tonight? My treat. I’m sure there’s a bottle of wine with our names on it somewhere.
I smile at my screen before I can help it. Jenna has a radar for when I need her that has never once failed to activate at the right moment — it's one of the things I love most about her, this particular gift for showing up at the exact right time without being asked.
I met Jenna the week I moved into my building three years ago.
She was in the hallway struggling with a piece of furniture that was approximately four times her size, and I helped her get it through her door, and she thanked me by producing a bottle of wine seemingly from nowhere and demanding that I stay and drink it.
We've been close ever since in the way that certain friendships form fast and hold firm — the kind built on shared sensibility rather than shared history.
She's from Chicago, which made us Midwest allies immediately in a city that sometimes feels like it was built for people who never had to scrape ice off a windshield.
We understand each other's references. We understand each other's particular brand of ambition — the kind that comes from growing up somewhere that taught you early that nothing is just handed over.
Sutton: Definitely. Wine sounds like the right answer.
Jenna: Great. Let’s meet at 6:30. That place by The Grove.
Sutton: Perfect. See you then.
Seated at a corner table in the Jenna listens the way she always listens — fully, without interrupting, with the occasional expression that tells me she's already ten steps ahead in her thinking.
When I finish she takes a long sip of her wine and looks at me with the directness that is one of her defining qualities.
"You seem fine," she says, with the tone of someone who finds this suspicious.
"I am fine." I tear off a piece of bread.
"I'm better than fine, honestly. The job was good experience but I wasn't growing. If the acquisition hadn't happened I probably would have started looking in another six months anyway."
"Sooo…you're not devastated," she says.
"No," I agree.
"That's your answer, then." She says it simply, like it's obvious, because to Jenna most things that people spend a lot of time complicating are actually quite obvious.
"If losing the job doesn't break your heart, then the job wasn't.. it. So what's.. it?"
I tell her about tech. About San Francisco. About Caleb's mention of his brother's company and the resume I'm planning to send.
She raises an eyebrow. "You'd actually move?"
"I'm thinking about it."
She's quiet for a moment, swirling her wine glass.
"I think you've been thinking about it for longer than today."
She's not wrong. I don't tell her that — I just finish my wine and let her refill it.
Jenna watches me across the table with the particular expression she reserves for moments when she thinks I am being more pragmatic than the situation warrants.
"And back to Caleb…how's that going? He’s really OK with you talking about San Francisco?"
I consider how to answer this accurately.
"Yes. He’s the one that offered the referral for the hiring manager." I say.
She reaches for her wine and says nothing, which from Jenna is a very specific kind of response.
I change the subject. She lets me, because she is a good friend, and because some things do not require being said aloud to be understood by both parties in a conversation. We spend the next two hours talking about everything and nothing.
When I leave the dinner, I feel lighter than I have in months.
Two weeks pass.
I’ve begun to quietly conclude that the Drake Industries contact was always going to be what most contacts in hiring pipelines are — a courtesy with a shelf life of about ten days before it expires into the category of didn't pan out. I’m not bitter about it.
I’ve rerouted my search accordingly and have two promising conversations in progress with firms that are making the right noises about the kind of role I am actually looking for.
It’s Thursday afternoon when my phone rings..
I’m at my kitchen island with a market research report open on one screen and a cover letter draft on the other, and when the call comes through — unknown number, San Francisco area code — I feel something shift in my chest that I can't immediately name.
Not excitement exactly, but something quieter and more electric, the specific sensation of a door swinging open in a hallway you had stopped walking down.
I take a deep breath as I answer before the third ring…
"Sutton Kane," I say.