3. Nate
NATE
Nate always woke at fifteen past six, a result of years of habit. This morning, when he woke, there was something new waiting for him. Memories of the night before that made him cringe.
The lounge. The whisky. Graham’s bright, hungry grin. A woman in emerald silk turning under the lights on a muted screen. And then his own voice, loud and certain, saying a thing no sober man would ever say.
I’ll marry her.
He sat up too fast and his stomach lurched.
Sunlight cut in through the floor-to-ceiling glass he’d paid a fortune for and now resented.
The penthouse spread out around him, gray and immaculate, fifty-one floors above the ground.
Everything in it had been chosen by someone he’d hired.
The art meant nothing to him. The view he rarely looked at.
He’d bought the highest unit in the building for the same reason he did most things — because it was the top, and being anywhere but the top still felt like the first step in a long fall back to where he’d come from.
A hundred million dollars. He’d shaken on it. He could still feel the dry warmth of Graham’s palm.
Nate pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The trouble wasn’t the money. He could lose a hundred million and still be obscenely rich. It would sting his pride far worse than his accounts. The trouble was the lie.
He’d let Graham believe he and Jasmine had been something, a real and recent thing, the kind a man might pick back up with a phone call.
The reality was less flattering. They’d had a handful of weeks six years ago, before she was a known name at all.
He’d liked her more than he’d let himself notice at the time. That was probably the whole problem.
And then he’d done the thing he did to everyone, eventually.
The memory surfaced uninvited. They were supposed to meet at a little Italian place.
He hadn’t put it in his calendar because back then he’d believed his memory was perfect.
That same evening a startup he’d been eyeing for months had thrown a last-minute event.
The men he needed in a room were all there, and Nate had gone along, because of course he had. The deal was the future.
He hadn’t agonized at all. He simply hadn’t thought of her until the next morning, when he suddenly realized the date wasn’t that night but the night before.
She’d never called. She’d never sent so much as a furious text.
At the time he’d taken that silence as indifference.
It hadn’t occurred to him that silence could be the loudest thing a person had to say.
He’d been relieved, really, handed an exit he didn’t have to use.
And he’d gone back to the only thing he’d ever truly trusted, which was the work.
Everyone who’d ever stayed long enough had said some version of the same sentence on the way out the door.
“You were never really here.”
They’d been right, and he’d let them go.
The betting company that had taken him to the top never once stood him up.
Never gone cold. Never asked him to be a different man than the one who’d clawed it into existence.
Numbers paid you back in proportion to what you put in. People were a worse investment.
Six years. He swung his legs out of bed and walked to the glass, looking down at the freeways already thickening with traffic.
Surely Jasmine had long since forgotten him.
She was a star now. She had premieres and magazine covers and a life so full it could not possibly have room left for a grudge against a man she’d known for three weeks. People moved on.
Would that work in his favor or against it?
He wasn’t sure at all.
What he did know was that he was different now. He was thirty-four, not twenty-eight. He understood things he hadn’t understood then. He could be the kind of man who showed up.
It was a comforting story, and he’d always been good at those.
Jumping in the shower, he washed until the hangover loosened its grip and dressed in the charcoal suit that made him look commanding. He reached for his phone almost without thinking. Forty-one emails had landed overnight. For a few blessed minutes, Nate let himself fall into the work.
But the bet sat underneath all of it, patient and immovable. He couldn’t out-work it. He’d shaken a man’s hand, and Nate didn’t break a handshake any more than he broke a contract. It was the one rule he’d never bent, which meant the only way out of the thing was straight through it.
He was on his second espresso and chewing on a good idea by seven. He didn’t need her to forgive him. He needed her in a room. The rest he could improvise once he was standing in front of her. He’d closed bigger deals on less.
He called Radha before he’d finished the espresso.
His chief of staff answered on the first ring, as she always did. He kept it vague. Jasmine was a contact he wanted to reconnect with, nothing more. He wanted to know where she would be in the next few days. Public things only. Nothing that crossed a line.
“Give me twenty minutes,” Radha said and hung up.
It took her fourteen.
There was a restaurant opening that night, she reported. A place in West Hollywood backed by a chef with a streaming show. Jasmine was confirmed on the guest list. Getting Nate added would be trivial. He was the kind of name that made an opening look like an event.
“Do it,” he said. “Quietly. I want it to look like I happened to be there.”
A pause on the line, just long enough to register as judgment. Radha had worked for him for five years and had a finely tuned sense for when he was about to do something he’d regret. “It’ll look exactly like that,” she said.
He set the phone down and stood at the window a moment longer. The old current was already moving in him, the one that lit up whenever he stood at the edge of something reckless and refused to step back. It had built him an empire. It had also, more than once, made him a fool.