12. Evan
Evan
Aspen had a completely different feel than London; that was the point.
London had been oak and portraits and a staircase you had to climb before they'd let you talk.
Aspen was thin bright air and fleece worn over thousand-dollar shirts.
The committee had traded the long conference table for a lodge with a view of three mountains.
They wanted to see how people acted when nobody was making them sit up straight.
The formality was gone. The judging wasn't. They'd just moved it outdoors and started watching how you treated a stranger over coffee.
We landed midmorning, and the mountains made a two-billion-dollar competition feel briefly ridiculous. Then you remembered the two billion dollars, and it stopped being ridiculous.
Kira came off the plane in jeans and boots, her hair down, a jacket she'd clearly owned a long time, longer than she'd been in this deal. I had to go look at the mountains for a while.
I'd only ever seen her dressed for work.
Days of blazers and the tight hair knot she wore for the committee, the look she'd chosen because the finance world reads a woman's clothes as a reflection of her competence and she'd decided she would show them what they were looking for.
This wasn't a different look. This was her in Fremont, the woman who she was when there was nothing to win.
The blazers made a case; this was just her.
I thought about my house in Medina, the stone island in a kitchen nobody had ever really cooked in, and the back of a woman standing at it.
I didn't give that woman a face in that image.
I wouldn't let myself, and how hard that was told me everything I didn't want to know.
We'd agreed. Not again while the deal was live.
I was keeping to it in the literal sense and losing it everywhere else.
The first event was an afternoon hike the committee called "an informal opportunity to connect," which everyone understood to mean an exam that was supposed to look casual.
Fifteen of us embarked on the trail, finalists and committee and staff, all pretending that the walking was the reason we were there.
Gabriella came in trail clothes that had never seen a trail and made them look like they'd been born on her.
Tanner came in gear so new the tags might as well have still been on it, laughing a half-beat late at things that weren't quite jokes.
Kira and I walked in the middle of the pack, staying close while trying not to look too close.
Halfway up, one of the committee members fell into step with us, a soft-spoken man from the Geneva office who asked, like it was nothing, what we'd do if the mandate's first year went badly.
"Call you the morning it started to," Kira said, before I could come up with a careful answer. "Not the quarter after. The morning."
"And show you the number that scared us," I said, "before you found it yourself."
He nodded like he'd gotten both parts of the answer and drifted back to the pack. Kira didn't look at me and I didn't look at her. We both knew we'd just passed the part of the exam the hike was actually for.
I couldn't tell you when it started. It had been there in London and I'd called it professional rapport. Here on a mountain with no table between us it was harder to lie about. She'd start a thought and I'd finish it. I'd raise a concern and she'd already be three steps into the answer.
It was the best working relationship of my life. It was also a problem I had no idea how to manage because Farah was on the trail.
She'd flown in with the committee and walked near the back where she could see everyone. Every so often her attention focused on us and stayed a beat longer than it needed to. She wasn't hostile, she was thorough.
I'd spent enough years being evaluated to know the difference between someone enjoying your company and someone building a profile, and Farah was building a profile. It had a section in it now that hadn't been there in London.
By this point, the committee had decided our work was good enough. What they were deciding now was whether they could live with us, and that was a bigger question. It included who you were on a mountain when you thought the test was over.
It also included whether the principal and the woman he'd hired to build his deal finished each other's sentences in a way that looked like partnership, or looked like something a diligence memo would flag.
I knew all of it, walking in the sun beside the best hire I'd ever made. And I didn't slow down or step away or put a careful foot of distance between us. I didn't want to. That was the whole problem, right there.
Ian caught up at the water stop, where the trail flattened and the committee spread out to admire a view they'd paid to admire.
"Two things," he said, the way he delivered information without breaking the moment. "Summit dinner's moved to the lodge, eight o'clock, less formal than we planned. And I heard something you'll want to know."
"Go on."
"Nyx. Someone on their team was talking at the London dinner about leaning hard into governance, selling it as a trusted relationship instead of a control process," he said evenly. "Tracks with how Hudson pitched it. I'd prepare for it in Dubai and assume she keeps hammering the trust angle."
"She already hammered it. In London she made us sound like contractors."
"She'll do it again, harder, on their home turf. It would be worth having Kira design part of the pitch to address it." He capped his water and looked up the line. "Just thought you'd want to know where she's headed."
It was good intel, better than good, the kind Ian always seemed to have first. I told him so, logged it as competitive intelligence, and thought no more about it.
A chief of staff who brought you your rival's playbook was doing his job, and the fact that he always had it first was half of why I'd hired him.
Knox texted while I was pretending to study the view. Board's off your back, we're unanimous, go win your thing. How's Aspen? How's the deal person?
Her name is Kira, I typed back.
I know her name. Just testing you. You passed. Then, a beat later, he texted, That was fast. Interesting.
I put the phone away and didn't ask myself why I'd corrected him again, or why the correction had come before the thought, or why Knox, four states away and looking at nothing but his phone, had heard the thing I kept saying wasn't there.
We walked down as the light went gold on the peaks. Kira fell into step beside me for the last stretch, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, but not touching. We were both so careful about it that the care was probably more obvious than touching would have been.
"You've gone quiet," she said.
"I'm behaving."
"I can tell. It's very clear," she said lightly, eyes ahead on the trail, and I felt the start of a smile before I'd decided whether to let it out.
"You know what the worst part is?" she asked.
"Tell me."
"I'm behaving too." She kept her eyes on the trail. "And I'm worse at it than you are."
In London she'd been formidable in a blazer, sharp on purpose, the kind of sharp that makes people nervous. Here, in boots with her hair down and the mountain light on her, she was someone I could picture at the stone island in that empty kitchen.
Now I gave the picture a face. I'd lost the fight to keep it from having one somewhere on the way down, and I kept it with me into the lodge that night. Not the deal, the face.