3. Kira
Kira
Friday morning, I made coffee the way I always did, which was too seriously. Then I carried it out to the balcony to argue with the two billion dollars I had racing around in my mind.
My condo was small and full. Books were stacked two deep on shelves built for half as many.
My coffee setup had cost an outrageous amount but made coffee worth getting up for in the morning.
The balcony held exactly one chair and a plant I kept alive mostly out of spite.
Below me, Fremont was already going about its morning, coffee carts and dog walkers, the bridge doing its slow lift for a boat, and none of it had anything to do with my thoughts.
Most mornings I'd have Nico on the phone by now. He'd prep at the restaurant, and I'd pretend the balcony counted as getting some fresh air.
Nico was one of my oldest and dearest friends, a brilliant executive chef at a high end Seattle restaurant and the person who could hear my deepest confessions while making me a dinner that would win awards.
He returned the favor by trusting me with the ups and downs of his relationship with his partner, Blaine, even though I couldn't return the culinary support.
This morning I had the deal instead, which was company enough. The complexity of the Al Rashid deal had been living in my head since Monday, and I'd been giving it a lot of space.
Four stops, and a committee that would take any weakness I left in the proposal and lean on it until it broke.
I'd found three things so far that Evan's team had missed, assumptions nobody had questioned because the man who'd made them was senior enough that questioning him felt like bad manners.
I'd never had good manners about being right.
I fixed all three before the coffee went cold. The satisfaction of a deal structure falling into place was the closest thing I had to peace. That was the deal. The deal was easy. The other part, not so much.
By ten I was at Straits, in the same conference room, across from the same man, pretending the same thing. That was not easy at all. The air between us had changed since Wednesday, and I couldn't pin down exactly when it had turned, which for me was its own alarm.
He was as controlled as he'd been all week, the same even voice, the same precise hands squaring pages against the table.
However, twice now I'd caught him holding a look a half-second past what the conversation needed.
Both times he'd been the one to break it, and Evan Weston did not strike me as a man who lost staring contests by accident.
I told myself I was inventing it.
"The track record section," he said. "You moved it again."
"I moved it back to where it wins. Past performance goes second, after the mission and vision. Committees don't fund your history; they fund what you will do."
"History matters."
"History gets you in the room." I slid the page across to him. "It doesn't close. You know that. You wrote half of this."
"In the wrong order, apparently."
"You wrote it like a man used to his history speaking for itself." I waited for the flicker. "Most of the time it probably does. Not with this committee."
He turned the page instead of answering, which was an answer.
"You disagree with the reorder," I said.
"I disagree with being handled."
"I'm not handling you. I'm handling the deck. You just happen to be involved."
"You always this blunt with the people signing your invoices?" he said with an edge.
"Only the ones who can take it. I'd go easy on you if I thought you were fragile."
"And if I am?"
"Then we'll both find out in London, and it'll be an expensive way to learn."
His mouth did the almost-smile again, and he shut it down inside a second. I was getting too good at reading what he kept off his face, tracking his tells faster than I wanted to. It was a problem I stashed away for later.
His hands were still on the page, flat and easy.
He never fidgeted; he'd decided that stillness read as control.
I knew exactly what those hands were capable of when he stopped deciding things.
I could imagine his fingers on my face and it nearly distracted me from work.
I put that thought where it belonged, which was nowhere near this table, and picked up the next page.
We worked well for an hour, the way we had Wednesday before he'd drifted off wherever he went, both of us finding the parts the other one missed.
We did well together, professionally speaking.
He was faster than his reputation, which irritated me because I'd priced in a man who coasted on the founder story but had gotten one who actually listened, adjusted, and came back sharper.
Halfway through the governance section, he leaned forward to point at a change I'd made, and his sleeve brushed my wrist. The warmth of it remained on my skin for three full pages after he'd pulled back.
I kept my eyes on the document. Working with someone that good was its own kind of intimacy.
Then he said something about a founder of a company they had invested in and the history behind it.
"The committee would want to hear about that and especially know if you can repeat your performance." I caught the double meaning of what I said too late.
The feeling in our conversation changed. His voice hadn't changed, but he paused before he answered. In that pause, I felt the exact distance between his hand on the table and mine, how little effort it would take to close it, and what it would mean.
"Past performance isn't a guarantee of future results," he said dryly, quoting the disclaimer every fund staples to the bottom of every document.
"No, but it tells you what someone's capable of."
"It tells you what they did once." He held my gaze, and this time he didn't break it. "Under specific conditions. That don't always repeat."
We were not talking about a portfolio company anymore. I was almost sure of it, and almost was the worst possible place to be. It left enough room to keep moving toward what I'd spent seven months walking away from.
"Then you build the deal so it doesn't depend on the conditions repeating," I said, and steered us back onto the page because one of us had to and it was clearly not going to be him.
As I left for the day, I kept turning that over on the walk to the elevator. He'd opened the door a careful inch and then let me be the one to close it. That meant he was either too much of a professional to walk through, or he was waiting to see whether I would. I didn't know which.
The not-knowing followed me the whole way down thirty-two floors. The weight of a question I wouldn't let myself answer was heavy.
I'd decided on that rooftop seven months ago to never think about this man again. I'd been disciplined about it, and that had worked right up until I walked into his conference room on Monday and found out the discipline didn't survive proximity. I couldn't budget for that part.
Nico came over that night and took over my kitchen like it had been waiting for him and was relieved he'd finally shown up.
He'd brought a bag from the restaurant's walk-in and the knife roll he didn't trust me to live without, then he set up at my counter.
He started breaking down a bunch of greens, his hands moving faster than his answers to my questions ever did.
The kitchen was different when he cooked in it. It stopped being a room where I reheated things and became a place with a purpose, garlic hitting warm oil, the whole condo filling with the smell.
"How's Blaine?"
"Good. New project, some mixed-use thing on Capitol Hill, so I've been eating standing up over the sink most nights." He said it the way you'd report the weather. "It's fine. We're fine."
I let it go by because it wasn't my night to push and because the greens had his whole attention now. It was what he did when he'd quietly decided a subject was finished. It turned out, we were both good at deciding subjects were finished.
So, I talked about the deal instead. The mandate, the contract to invest their two billion dollars, the four cities, the committee that could make my whole year or take my name apart in front of the only people whose opinion mattered to anything in my business.
I told him about the deal structure I was working on, which was the best thing I'd created in years.
It was the kind of project that reminded me why I did the work.
I told him about Evan, just a little. How sharp he was, how he'd built the whole pitch approach wrong and had known it the second I fixed it.
Nico slid the greens into the pan and they hit the oil and hissed and folded down. "You're not talking about the deal structure anymore."
"I'm talking about a difficult client."
"You've had difficult clients. You call them difficult, you don't describe the way they smile." He tasted off the edge of the spoon, adjusted with a pinch of salt, still not looking at me, which was how I knew he was leaving the door open on purpose. "This one is different."
"This one has a two-billion-dollar fund and the Al Rashid committee to win over. His smile is not on my list of concerns."
"Okay," he said patiently. "Then it's not."
"You don't believe me."
"I believe two things can be true at once. You're a strategist, it's basically the job." He plated the greens over something warm and set the bowl in my hands. "I just think one of them's going to need more heat than you're giving it, and you already know which one."
That was Nico. He never told you what you were feeling, he just put it in front of you and let you sit with it. The subject was closed, and I loved him for closing it and resented, a little, that he'd found what was under it before I'd admitted there was anything to find.
We ate on the balcony. He told me a long story about a line cook and a broken walk-in and a hundred pounds of ruined halibut, and I laughed in the right places. The night was easy the way Nico always made things easy.
I didn't mention the rooftop in October, and he didn't ask for more. We were two people leaving each other room, which was either friendship or cowardice. Most nights I couldn't tell the difference.
After he left, I stood at the sink with the last of the wine and the deal outline still glowing on my laptop across the room, four cities and two billion dollars and my name on every page of it.
The deal was the best thing I'd ever built. The man was a complication I hadn't planned for.