Chapter 29
The opportunity sprang out of nowhere, and at the ideal moment.
The previous week they had closed two of their three open positions.
The cash just sat there in the fund’s accounts, a frightening sum if he allowed himself to think of it as anything more than symbols.
Elements required to put the next step into motion.
The Journal spoke of the December doldrums, almost as if the world could be forgiven for taking a month off.
Then rumors appeared on the three professional chat rooms he had come to consider his best conduits for initial alerts.
For the first time ever, all three registered the news on the exact same night.
An LA-based music company had built itself into a regional powerhouse, comprising four semiautonomous divisions: a distribution company, a top-of-the-line recording studio, a concert organizer, and a quasi-independent group handling backlists and music rights.
But five dismal quarters in a row had wreaked havoc with their cash reserves.
The stock had tanked, and their major investors were pushing for an executive-level overhaul. Before it was too late.
The news sources all reported the same thing: Two different global powers were considering an outright purchase. Interest in acquiring the group was driven by the strength of their backlist and good reports about two new signings.
Colin gave it a day. The calculations almost completed themselves. The upside was stratospheric. He searched the major feeds and discovered a paragraph in the business section of the LA Times’s online business news. He feared he had left it too late.
There was nothing else on the horizon. Not even a hint of motion anywhere, at least until the new year.
Colin called Lucretia and committed all the cash they had on hand. Seventy-seven percent of the fund’s holdings.
Christmas came and went in a series of events and friends and families and celebrations.
For the first time in his life, Colin found himself fielding invitations.
Arnold and Sandrine, Celeste and her extended family, Mira and Alexi and Ethan, Roland and Regina.
He ate to the point of feeling genuine pain when he lay down at night.
On three separate occasions he drove with friends through Historic Wilmington and walked the upscale streets, gawking at the lights and the window displays and the people.
He tasted spiked eggnog and whiskey sours for the first time, and loathed them both.
It was a wondrous, magical period. He was sorry to see it end, just fade away on the first of January, descending into silence and a sort of bemused contentment on many faces.
Through it all, he kept having these niggling doubts.
Tight whispers that reminded him of the unseen fears he had carried throughout his early years.
The shadows that loomed behind unopened doors, the silent threat his father brought into the house on bad days.
The uncertainty, the absence of control.
All of it came and went in great swirling eddies that sometimes attacked with such force the entire world came to a screeching halt.
And then it was gone again. Vanished. The world restarted, the laughter and happy chatter resumed, he was once again surrounded by people who cared.
For the first time in months, Colin took to running his calculations every night, and sometimes again the next morning.
Inputting whatever new data he could find, which wasn’t much.
Even during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the unease would not let up.
He assumed it came from the size of this investment.
After all, this was the largest position his fund had ever taken.
Nine days into the new year, the builders were gone and the cleaners finished.
Arnold and Sandrine led him through the downstairs apartment.
Colin had never been farther than the front office, which was now transformed.
The heavy dark furniture, the uncomfortable sofa, the yellowed wallpaper, gone.
In its place was a bright and airy room with a simple pale wash on the walls and ceilings, and matching beige carpet and sash drapes.
Even the two windows had been replaced. He had never noticed the view until that moment.
Always before his focus had been exclusively on the woman seated behind the massive oak desk.
Which was gone as well, replaced by an IKEA-designed work table of pale wood with bright blue metal legs.
The office also served duty as his parlor, and now contained bookshelves and new sofa and comfy chair and flat-screen TV.
The kitchenette had all new appliances, the small dining table stationed against the opposite wall.
And downstairs a bedroom, as bright and cheerful as a windowless room could possibly be.
Single bed of pale wood, matching dresser and cupboard, new bathroom.
Colin walked from room to room in a daze.
That night Colin filled his plate with the others, then carried his dinner into the apartment and ate alone.
He doubted he would do this very much, unless work demanded it.
The time together in the dining hall was too important.
But tonight was special. The silence, the space, the newness and clean lines, the solitude …
He stopped several times just to breathe in the pleasure.
At precisely one-fifteen that morning, he awoke from a nightmare he could not remember. The clock on the bedside table seemed not to show the time, but rather to shout in pale blue luminosity that he had left it all too late.