3. Saylor
SAYLOR
Juniper Intelligence occupied twelve floors of a steel-and-glass tower on the east end of the financial district.
I arrived Wednesday at five o’clock to find Maddox Vale waiting for me in the lobby. Not his assistant. Not a coordinator. Him. Hands in his pockets, black T-shirt, tattoos on full display, standing next to a security desk as if CEOs regularly played tour guide for junior PR consultants.
“You could’ve sent someone,” I said.
“I could’ve.”
He didn’t elaborate. He also didn’t move until I reached him, and when I did, his gaze tracked from my face to the portfolio under my arm and back.
“You brought the notebook again.”
“It’s a portfolio.”
“Does it make you feel more professional?”
“I am professional.”
“I know.” His mouth moved—that almost-smile I’d spent three days trying not to think about. “That’s what worries me.”
He walked me through the building. Engineering on four and five. Product on six. Marketing, Legal, Operations stacked above.
The floors were open-plan and sunlit, clusters of standing desks broken up by glass-walled meeting rooms and living walls with trailing greenery.
People said hi to him—not the stiff, performative greeting employees give a CEO they’re afraid of.
Casual. First names. A woman from engineering stopped him to ask about her daughter’s soccer game, and he knew the score.
I was there to build a sizzle reel. That was the term I’d pitched Tasha on Monday—a short, high-impact video designed to reframe his public narrative.
Not an apology tour. Not a scripted mea culpa.
A sizzle reel. Fifteen seconds had torn him down.
Sixty could rebuild him, if the raw material was real.
The raw material was real.
I’d known that since Friday’s intake meeting, when he’d told me about the ninety days of salary continuation and the placement calls he’d made himself.
But hearing a CEO say the right things in a conference room wasn’t evidence.
I’d built enough client profiles to know the difference between what people claimed and what the record showed.
“I want to see the placement data,” I said. “The tracking you mentioned on Friday. If it’s going to anchor the sizzle reel, I need to see the documentation.”
He stopped walking. We were on the seventh floor, standing between a glass conference room and a wall covered in framed photos of company retreats. His jaw shifted.
“That’s not public information.”
“It doesn’t have to be. I need to verify it so I can build the narrative around confirmed facts.”
“It’s not a narrative. It’s a spreadsheet.”
“Then show me the spreadsheet.”
He looked at me for a long beat. Something was working behind his expression—not resistance, exactly. Reluctance. He’d worked quietly because doing it loudly would’ve been making a show of it. And now I was asking him to hand it over to a woman whose entire job was making a show of things.
“This way,” he said.
His office was on the eleventh floor. Corner, floor-to-ceiling glass, a desk that looked like he actually used it—papers, a half-empty coffee mug, two monitors, side by side. He pulled up a file and turned the screen toward me without sitting down.
Eighty-three names. Current employer. Start date. Salary range. Notes column—short, blunt, clearly written by him.
Offered to ConnectBase, started March. Relocated to Austin, wife’s family. Took a teaching position, seems happy. Still looking—sent her resume to Connie at Helix last week.
Forty-one placed. Nine in active conversations. Thirty-three still in the pipeline. He hadn’t just tracked them. He was still working on it. Five months later.
“You never told anyone about this,” I said.
“I’m not interested in getting credit for doing the bare minimum.”
“Maddox, this isn’t the bare minimum. Most CEOs don’t even know how many people they laid off, let alone where they ended up.”
“Most CEOs are full of shit.”
I stared at the screen. The notes were the part that undid me.
Not the numbers—the tone. Seems happy. A billionaire CEO tracking whether a former junior data analyst seemed happy in her new teaching job.
Not because anyone was watching. Not because it would play well in a sizzle reel.
Because he’d made a decision that changed their lives and he refused to look away from the aftermath.
My heart ached. The professional wall I’d been maintaining since Friday—the one I rebuilt every morning and every night, the one that kept Maddox Vale in the category of client instead of the category of man I can’t stop thinking about—developed a crack I could feel spreading in real time.
“This is the sizzle reel,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I intended. “Right here. This is the piece of the truth the clip cut out.”
He closed the file. “I didn’t show you that so you could put it on camera.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
Because the version of him I’d been hired to construct for the public wasn’t a construction.
Because I’d walked into this building expecting to find the gap between the man and the image, and there wasn’t one.
Because my hands were trembling against my portfolio and the professional line I’d drawn was getting thinner by the hour.
“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I said.
He held my gaze. Didn’t blink. Didn’t smile. The afternoon sun through his office windows was catching the edges of his tattoos, ink and warm skin, and my breath was doing something I couldn’t control.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something else.”
The game room was on the eighth floor. Pool table, foosball, a row of arcade cabinets, a wall-mounted TV, couches in a semicircle around a low table scattered with playing cards and half-finished puzzles. The room was empty—late enough on a Wednesday that most employees had cleared out.
“Company perk,” he said. “Open twenty-four hours. Engineers practically live in here during crunch weeks.”
“You’re showing me this for the sizzle reel.”
“I’m showing you this because you’ve been holding that portfolio against your chest for two hours, and I thought you could use a break.”
He pulled two cue sticks from the wall rack and rolled one across the felt toward me. I set the portfolio down on the nearest couch. My fingers had left damp prints on the leather.
“Eight-ball,” he said. “I’ll rack.”
“Stakes?”
He looked up from racking the balls. “You want to play for stakes?”
“I don’t play without them.”
His eyes moved over my face. Slow. Deliberate. The room was too warm and too quiet and the fluorescent lights above the pool table were buzzing at a frequency I could feel in my teeth.
“What did you have in mind?” he said.
My heart was hammering. Every professional instinct I had was screaming at me to pick up the portfolio, thank him for his time, and walk out of this building before I did something that couldn’t be undone.
Tasha’s face flashed through my mind. The Juniper account. The first real opportunity I’d been given, and I was about to—
“Strip pool,” I said.
His hands went still on the rack. His eyes came back to mine. Dark, steady, burning.
“Your break,” he said.