13. Kira
Kira
The arrival dinner had been exactly what you'd expect at these things.
Too much wine, too little said, everyone watching everyone else under cover of the pleasantries.
I'd gone up to my room early and let Evan work the room without me, which was the professional call and also the only way I trusted myself to behave.
By morning the summit had gotten back to its formality. The fleece and the wildly expensive views of the mountains were still there, but day two was when they stopped pretending the hiking was why we were there.
The partners session took place in the glass room with the mountains in the distance while the work on the two-billion dollar deal was on the table in front of us.
Each finalist got the same brief: show the committee your ecosystem, the founders and operators and other investors who pick up the phone when you call.
In this session, we were to show the committee our relationships and network to demonstrate that our fund was real and solid. It was the one event Gabriella had the edge to win, and everyone in the room knew it, which was why I'd argued for us to go last.
Evan ran the first half of the presentation and I ran the second.
Somewhere in the first minutes of Evan's part, I stopped watching the deck and started reading Tariq instead.
He sat at the end of the row of committee members with his hands folded, saying nothing, which was what he did throughout the pitches.
He made his decisions while other people did the talking.
When Evan described the company founders we had invested in who'd moved with us from one funding round to the next, Tariq's attention held. When Evan presented the investment allocation metrics, it drifted. Not far, but enough to notice.
So, when it came to me, I put the numbers away.
I'd prepared ten minutes of my presentation on how the deal would be structured and I didn't use any of it.
I led instead with the story of the COO in one of the fund's companies who'd texted Evan at midnight in the middle of a crisis and gotten a real answer inside the hour.
Then, I went with the founder who'd taken a lower valuation number from us because we'd sat with her through the quarter that nearly killed her company. Tariq unfolded his hands, which meant he was paying attention. For him, that was a big moment.
Evan's arm was a few inches from mine on the table, close enough that I kept paying more attention to that than I should in a meeting like this. I made myself keep my focus intently on the pitch. There was a room to read and it was my job to do it.
Someone else was reading the room, too. Farah wasn't looking at the deck on the monitor, she was watching the interaction between us, the way Evan presented a thought and I picked it up without either of us checking to see if the other was ready. In London, it looked like we were a team.
Here, Farah wasn't taking notes because she'd stopped needing to write it down. It looked to her like something the committee would have to discuss when the time came to make a decision.
Thornton-Sayre had gone before the break, and it had gone the way I expected.
The outcome was clear before anyone said a word.
Tanner had good bones to work with but he oversold them, and when a committee member asked him to reconcile two numbers in his presentation that needed clarification, he went for an explanation instead of an answer.
Everyone in this business has been asked that kind of question and everyone has an answer ready. Tanner had only his smile and a second try at discussing the same slide. The committee got very polite. In this competition, that politeness was the sound of your door closing.
He was in the lobby afterward, by the windows, on his phone with no one on the other end, holding it the way you would when you just needed to do something with your hands. Nobody had officially announced anything, they didn't have to.
He'd inherited a fund from two men who'd retired with their reputations, and he'd made some bad decisions trying to keep it going. Now he stood here in this lobby realizing that the committee had already decided about him.
I knew that exact feeling. I'd been where he was standing the day I understood that my old firm, Lennox, was going to protect Warren Dufresne and not me, and I'd walked out of that place with my face held still so no one could see what I felt. Tanner hadn't learned to do that yet.
I could have gone past, but I stopped to talk to him.
"This is hard, but you built relationships that mattered. You were in there, you were in the game," I said.
He looked down for a moment and then said, "Thanks. You're right and I appreciate that you said it."
"This won't be the last investment committee who will take your call. The fact that you got here will tell people something."
He nodded and walked on to wherever he was heading next.
I went to find some coffee and do the math I'd been putting off since it was clear Tanner had been eliminated.
Two funds left. Ours and hers.
I'd been weighing the risks in the background, keeping them there and not giving them attention until I was ready.
I realized I was starting to pay attention to them while drinking the bad coffee in the lobby.
When the field went from three to two, the committee stopped asking who was best and started asking who they could live with.
Our investment returns got us into the competition.
The last stretch was decided on character, on governance, and on whether the people who won would still be trustworthy when the decision had been made.
The fastest way to lose that stretch was to hand your competitor a story that could end up as part of the evaluation.
I was part of the risks now, an independent strategist, hired to structure the principal's deal, with a percentage of the mandate in her fee, and also sleeping with the man whose name was on the letterhead.
Put that in a governance memo and it wrote itself: conflict of interest, compromised judgment.
It was the exact contrast Gabriella could draw between us without a single cruel word, just by being the finalist who hadn't blurred a line. This risk had a story now, and my name was in it.
I found Evan in the side corridor that the lodge called a business center, and Ian was with him. I stopped short of the doorway. The voices were pitched lower than was necessary.
"A full background check," Ian said, even as ever, the tone he kept for conversations that needed careful attention. "Employment, the Lennox exit, the financials. Nothing adversarial, just diligence, given how much she can see."
I didn't catch Evan's answer. I caught his pause before it, which for him told me what he was thinking.
Ian wasn't wrong, and that was the part that scared me. Of course, a fund competing for a deal this size would want to know about the woman they'd put in it. It was part of the due diligence process, exactly as advertised.
It stung precisely because it was reasonable.
I had top-level access to everything, granted one request at a time with my name on every approval, and now that access was a liability someone would have to review because I'd let the rest of it turn personal.
I stepped back before either of them turned.
I was good at leaving a place before anyone knew I was in it.
The summit dinner was on the lodge's lower deck, with heaters going and the mountains sliding from gold to purple to gone. The mood was the loose, dangerous kind that follows an elimination, everybody a little lighter for not being the one who'd gone home. Gabriella found me at the railing.
"You told that COO story up front," she said, with no preamble and a glass of something in her hand. "The second Tariq's hands came apart, that was the shift in their thinking, right there, and it went to you."
"You were watching his hands too."
"I watch everything, it's why I'm still here.
" She looked out at the dark and then back at me.
"I've gone up against a lot of people who structure deals.
Most of them build a fortress and dare you to take it.
You built something the client didn't know they needed and let them believe they thought of it.
It's better work, and I've been meaning to say so since London. "
I told her thank you and meant it, which was the trouble with her. You couldn't just call her the rival and be finished with her.
"Can I say something a bit more difficult?" she asked. "One woman who's done this a long time to another?"
My left hand was flat on the railing and my right tapped it three times before I knew I'd done it, the old tell, the one I did before I was going deep into a point. I closed my hand. She noticed it and said nothing about it, which was almost worse.
"You and Weston." she said gently. "I won't pretend I haven't seen it, seeing things is everything on this job. And if I've seen it, the woman at the end of the committee table has seen it, and she writes things down."
I started to say there was nothing to see. She lifted one hand, not to stop me, to spare me.
"I don't care who you sleep with, Kira. Truly, I'm too old and too busy.
" She took a breath. "But I know your reputation.
I asked around about you before the meeting in London.
That's my job too, and everyone said the same thing to me.
She works alone. She won't let anyone close enough to compromise her.
That's the way she works, that's her whole brand. "
"So, ask the question," I said, shorter. My voice proved I was bracing for something.
"You built your career on not letting anyone compromise your integrity without your knowledge," she said like she admired it. "So, I'm curious what it means that you have finally done it. Just to yourself, with you as a part of the deal."
The knife between my ribs was clean. She didn't twist it; she didn't need to.
"You don't have to answer me." She didn't wait for one. "You'll answer yourself, at three in the morning, for the rest of this deal. I only thought you should hear it once from someone who isn't trying to hurt you."
She touched my arm, briefly, warm and real. "You're the best I've been up against in years. I'd hate to watch you lose on the one thing you swore you'd never lose on."
She was already turning to go when she said the last part, casually, over her shoulder, just one professional to another.
"For what it's worth, the governance approach you're building for the pitch in Dubai, emphasizing trust instead of control.
It's the right call, it's exactly where I'd go.
" She gave me a small smile. "May the better relationship win. "
Then she was gone, going off into the noise of the deck, and I stood at the railing and I didn't think about the personal hit she gave me. Not yet. I thought about the last thing she'd said.
The governance approach we decided on for Dubai was only four days old. We had decided on it in a Seattle conference room, refined it on the jet, and shared it with no one outside the team. Gabriella Hudson had just described it to me here in Colorado like she'd been reading my notes.
It was probably nothing. She was the best-prepared fund manager I'd ever run up against, and the best-prepared ones guessed right so often it looked like they knew. She'd probably come to the same approach I had; there were only so many right ways to do it and we were both good enough to find them.
Probably. I felt the word pointing out what I really was avoiding, and I didn't like how it felt.
Two funds left, and the committee was watching everything now, how we were walking and talking and how we were careful about not touching.
They were watching the one thing I'd sworn I would never let compromise me and I'd let it compromise me anyway.
My hand was flat on the railing again. I tapped it three times and told myself I was worried about the deal.
I'd never managed to lie to myself for long. It was the main reason I was any good at this.