by Sadie Hayes
“Well,” Ryan said, sighing, “when they invested, they owned forty-two point six percent of the company. But then your cofounder left, right? That girl? When she was fired, over three hundred thousand of her shares hadn’t yet vested.”
“So,” T.J. said, stunned, “when Amelia left everyone’s relative ownership increased?”
“Yep. So PKC—or rather, this mystery investor—now owns over half—fifty-one point four percent to be precise—of the company. That’s why they’re freaking out.” A phone rang in the background. “Listen, I gotta hop on that other line. Sorry I can’t be more help on the trust—you should probably just talk to your dad. He’s the trustee, so as long as I’ve got his approval I can give you whatever you want.”
“Thanks, Ryan. You’ve been unbelievably helpful.”
When he hung up the phone, T.J. let the silence of the empty, ransacked office consume him.
Could anything else go wrong? His father was a cheater, his perfect Atherton family was a farce, Riley didn’t have feelings for him at all, and the vapid women he’d tried to replace her with suddenly made him nauseous. He’d been so distracted by his personal drama that he’d let Amelia get fired. And now, not only did he no longer control his stake in Doreye, but the company itself was controlled by a mysterious invisible entity. It’s not that he wasn’t in control of the things that affected him; it’s that the things that affected him were uncontrollable.
T.J. carefully put away the mess he’d created in the office. When everything was in its place he sat in silence and felt empty. He needed to take back control, but of what? The company? His life? Where could he even start?
38
Head in the Clouds
Adam had already been at the office for four hours when T.J. arrived at nine.
“Hey.” He nodded as T.J. walked into the conference room. “Just a sec.” He finished a diagram he was drawing in red marker on the floor-to-ceiling dry-erase-board wall, which was at present covered from corner to corner in Adam’s handwriting.
“What are you doing?” T.J.’s voice was stunned.
“Hold on,” Adam said, finishing the diagram and standing back, arms crossed over his chest, to reflect on what he’d just mapped out. He nodded to himself and reached for a Philz coffee cup, his third of the day, as he turned to T.J.
“This,” he said, indicating with his eyebrows his wall handiwork, “is how we’re going to save Doreye.”
T.J.’s face was cautious, unsure how to process this version of Adam, whose caffeinated energy seemed to fill the whole room. Adam was cleanly shaven and standing with perfect poise, and his eyes were bright with a sense of purpose and direction he hadn’t had since the fateful day with Amelia.
T.J. stayed cautious, putting the conversation he’d planned to have with him on hold as he peered at Adam, moving closer to the whiteboard wall and reading what was there.
Adam sat patiently back as his cofounder read, nodding occasionally.
T.J. finally turned to him, hopeful for the first time since he’d gotten off the phone with Ryan. “This could work.”
Adam raised his eyebrows as he grinned and nodded, exhilarated by his problem solving.
“But it’s incredibly risky. I mean, to refocus our attention right now … if it doesn’t work, we’re—”
“It’s going to work,” Adam interrupted, not with arrogance but with manic belief.
“Have you told the engineers?”
“They’ll be in at ten. I think we should tell them together.”
T.J. cocked his head. Adam had never shared credit for anything, especially things that were uniquely his own, not that T.J. could remember that ever happening.
“You know”—Adam shrugged, picking up on T.J.’s confusion—“present a united front.”
“What happened to you?” T.J. studied Adam’s face. “Did you get laid?”
Adam laughed but deflected. If only he’d gotten laid! Instead he’d gotten thrown in jail with some rambling drunks and a kindhearted police officer.
But something about that night had cleared his thoughts. It’s not that he wasn’t thinking about Lisa or about Amelia or about wanting to go have a drink, he just wasn’t doing it right now. Right now, and until it was finished, he was fixing Doreye.
When the engineers had all arrived, Adam called a group meeting in the living room–turned-lounge.
“As you all know,” Adam started, “we’ve run into some problems with Doreye. The app itself is too advanced for the devices currently available to users. One solution is for us to wait a few years for Apple and Samsung to catch up. But there may be another solution. One that, if we all work together, won’t be as difficult as we may have previously thought.”
The team of eight all looked at Adam and then looked at T.J. for his reaction, but T.J. kept his eyes forward to hear Adam out.
“I’ve divvied up all of Doreye’s functions between three teams. These teams will be led by T.J., Arjun, and me. If the smartphone hardware that Doreye runs on isn’t advanced enough, then we simply won’t use the smartphones. We’ll use the cloud.” Adam looked out across his engineers to let it sink in. “For the next week, we are going to research the processes that other companies, like Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, are using to accomplish similar tasks. By outsourcing these functions I think we can reduce the overload that’s making the devices crash when they load Doreye. We can do this without increasing the size of the app. Does this make sense?”
Now Adam turned to Arjun, who had been increasingly skeptical since taking over as head engineer from Amelia, and everyone else’s eyes followed.
Arjun was standing next to the couch, arms crossed over his chest. He breathed in through his nose and clicked his tongue, thinking.
Finally, he responded. “To do this quickly we need to find an off-the-shelf solution that is somehow compatible, which means we’d either need to license an expensive patent or spend eight months re-creating everything from scratch.”
“At the very least, it’s worth taking some time to know what else is out there,” T.J. stepped in and said. “Plus we’ve got funding to make acquisitions and could do it quietly if it came to that. We need to at least try.”
“What we need”—Arjun shook his head and said under his breath, but with the clear intention of being heard—“is Amelia.”
“Sorry?” Adam asked pointedly. “If you’re going to say something, say it.”
Arjun looked straight at him, the frustration he’d been suppressing for weeks mounting in his voice. “I said, what we need is Amelia. It’s time to stop dicking around and get her back. She was everything in this company and you screwed it up. That’s the problem that needs to be fixed.”
Adam nodded in patient acknowledgment; he knew Arjun felt Amelia was the only solution. He also knew that Arjun was afraid to say anything since Adam had snapped at him. This time Adam took a different approach and said quietly, “You’re right: I messed things up. And I admit it, and I’m sorry all of you had to see it and suffer because of it.” He looked around the room at the faces of each of his employees. “But I’m going to fix it. Maybe not the way that you want, but I will fix it and bring this company back up to the standard you deserve.”
Adam looked back at Arjun. “And don’t worry about the patents. If you can take a chance and trust me one last time on this, I promise you I’ll take care of making sure we can execute.”
39
Pretty Woman
Patty felt her heart racing with anticipation as she walked toward the Rosewood bar, but she was careful to take confident, measured steps: not too hurried, not too desperate. She was wearing her Stuart Weitzman boots with a short purple Alice & Olivia silk sheath dress. She’d done her full ninety-minute prep routine for tonight’s meeting: shaved her legs, scrubbed her skin with an exfoliator before applying lightly perfumed lotion, plucked her eyebrows, flossed, blown out and curled her hair, and touched up her manicure. She’d even taken time in the shower
to deep clean her belly button and the insides of her ears.
Over the past month, one-on-one focus groups had been requested at an increasing rate. Patty rationalized that it was easier for executives to zero in on the reactions of their target demographic without the social pressure of having other girls around.
When this request came in, Patty decided to take the one-on-one herself; she was determined to prove to Lisa that women could look great and help men understand their needs without being moral sellouts.
The man she was meeting had requested someone “interested in fashion” for a consulting project he was doing for a “boutique retailer in France looking to expand into the United States market.” He’d requested to meet with a girl who had studied in Paris and considered herself up on the latest fashion trends. He suggested they meet at the bar at Rosewood for a two-hour one-on-one focus group.
“Trey?” Patty asked a man seated at a small cocktail table with a notebook in front of him. He had olive skin and dark silky hair, and was quite literally the most attractive man Patty had ever seen. She felt butterflies in her stomach with simultaneous hope and fear that this was the man she was meeting.
He looked up. “Patty Hawkins?”
“That’s me.” She blushed, ecstatic.
He stood up and they shook hands. His grip was firm around her hand and her mind wandered to his fingers in her hair. “Thanks so much for taking time to do this,” he said as he pulled out her chair and lifted a hand to the waitress. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Sure.” Patty instinctively batted her eyelashes. “I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay, please.”
“Sure,” he said as the waitress took the order. “Just a Coke for me.” He smiled at her.
Patty felt her heart sink: a Coke? Should she not have ordered alcohol? Just drink it slowly, she told herself, remembering that he was paying for her opinion because she was fashionable and of French persuasion.
“So how much time have you spent in France?” Trey asked.
“I’ve been several times, actually,” Patty explained. “I spent a summer in Paris when I was in high school as part of an exchange program, and my family took a long trip to the Côte d’Azur when I was in middle school. I’m heading back for fall quarter next year; I’m hoping to study at the Sorbonne, coincidentally where my sister is a resident. I’m still trying to figure out what classes I can get into and still get credit at Stanford.”
“I see.” Trey wrote her answers down.
“Are you from France?” she asked, detecting an accent. She crossed her legs and shifted her weight onto one hip to move herself closer to him.
“Oh, me?” He looked surprised. “No, no, no. I’m Italian. Milanese, actually, but have been in America a long time. So what are your favorite brands?”
Patty thought it strange that he spoke so little about himself, but she went on: “I love Alice & Olivia—that’s what this dress is.” She pushed back in her chair and opened her arms so he could see.
“It’s nice.” He nodded neutrally. Or did he look at her chest? Her insides tingled.
“And I wear a lot of Rachel Zoe’s stuff and of course Citizens and Paige for jeans. And Rebecca Taylor.”
He nodded without looking up from his notepad.
“And for special occasions, I love Hervé Léger, but who doesn’t, right?” She leaned across the table and tapped his tanned arm affectionately.
“Indeed. Beautiful pieces. Where do you mostly shop?”
Patty felt a pang of insecurity twist in her gut when she realized his eyes were looking down at his notepad—not at her. What if Lisa had been right, and he had thought this was a date, but he’d gotten here and taken one look at her and decided she wasn’t worth it? Of course that was it, her brain started to settle: He’d been expecting a hot, skinny Parisian fashionista. And she, even after ninety minutes of prepping, was a big and bulky and lately-gone-up-a-dress-size nobody.
She took a big gulp of wine and said softly, “I like Neiman Marcus.”
“Anywhere else?” He looked up, confused by her change in tone.
“And obviously I shop on Gilt Groupe and Bloomspot and Piperlime.”
“Oh, you do? Do you prefer online shopping to in-store?”
This was so humiliating. She was the head of the company and she couldn’t do the work. She was the ugly madame who collected money while the pretty girls got to have all the fun.
“It depends. I like both. Obviously there’s always a place for going to the mall with friends or whatever, but it’s nice having the option of online.”
“Okay; just a few more questions.”
This sucks, Patty thought to herself, finishing the wine and gesturing to the waitress for another without asking his permission. She answered a few more questions until, after a mere forty-five minutes of their two-hour session, Trey said he thought he’d gotten what he needed.
“Okay,” Patty said, standing up. The two glasses of wine had made her more confident, or more reckless, and she turned to him in a last-ditch attempt. “Are you staying here tonight?”
“I am.” He nodded. “Flying back to New York tomorrow, but here for the evening.”
“Is the room nice?” she asked. “I’ve never seen the rooms here.”
“It is,” Trey said casually, studying her eyes carefully.
“Could I see yours?”
“I think we could arrange that,” Trey said while looking into her eyes, and she felt her heart melt. Boldness does pay, she thought to herself.
As she followed him back to his room, Patty came to understand a new view of the situation: He was intimidated. He was a good guy; he’d never done this before and was nervous about how it worked. She felt her affection for him grow: handsome and timid, like the boy next door who doesn’t know he’s prom king.
He held the door open and she proceeded in, pretending to admire the decor.
“What do you think?” he asked, his firm eye contact making her skin tingle.
She walked close to him and put her hand on his well-defined arm. “I think a lot of things.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think you’re really hot, and I think I’m in your hotel room, and I think I’d like to know what you want.”
The left corner of Trey’s mouth curled up into a smile and he stared into Patty’s eyes for several beats, studying her and what she’d just said.
Finally he stepped back and pulled something out of his pocket.
“What’s that?” Patty asked flirtatiously.
Trey held the object up and let it flip open so she could see.
“A police badge,” he said.
Patty felt the blood in her face drain, not sure how to process this information. But he didn’t give her time to speculate.
“We’ve gotten several tips that Focus Girls is running a questionable operation. I met with you to try to decipher whether what you’re doing qualifies as prostitution.”
Patty felt like he had punched her in the gut. Prostitution? It was one thing for Lisa to think it was sketchy, but her friends weren’t prostitutes. Her legs were weak, and she sat on the corner of the bed, her hands on her knees.
“What do you have to say?”
Patty opened her mouth but couldn’t find words and just shook her head at Trey before looking back at the carpet. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Her brain flashed back to the man who she’d thought was insulting her ability to run a company. You don’t seem like the type, he’d said. Did he know? Did everyone know, except her?
She felt her stomach lurch and looked up at the cop, terrified, before bolting to the bathroom and vomiting into the toilet bowl.
She emerged a half hour later. Trey was sitting in a chair, reading from a file.
“I’m sorry,” Patty mumbled.
“It’s okay; I’ll have someone come clean it up.”
“Are you going to arrest me?” Patty squeaked, looking down at her feet.
“
No,” Trey said. “I’m just trying to understand what’s going on with your company.”
Patty nodded silently like a child who knows she deserves punishment.
“Here’s what I think we should do,” Trey said. “You take a cab home and get some sleep, then come to the station tomorrow and we’ll talk through what’s going on and where it might have gotten out of control.”
She looked up hopefully. “So you mean I won’t be in trouble?”
“I didn’t say that. But prostitution rings tend to have many constituents doing questionable things, which means you’ve got a lot of room to cooperate.”
Patty nodded rapidly. “Yes. I understand. I will.”
“Okay.” Trey let out a sigh and handed her his card. “Get home. But do not drive. I’ll call you tomorrow to set up a time for you to come in.”
Patty turned to leave.
“And Patty?” Trey said. “As a man, not as a police officer, can I just say you’re way too beautiful a woman to wear so much makeup and such a short dress.”
40
Shabby Chic
A streetlamp orange-illuminated a steady drizzle that pattered against the glistening pavement in front of a bus stop on Hanover Street in midtown Palo Alto. Two homeless men took shelter under the bus stop’s cover, one laid out sleeping on the bench and the other sitting upright with his head curled down, huddled into himself for warmth.
The headlights of a slow-moving Hewlett-Packard security car illuminated the men before rolling on to patrol the other areas of the technology giant’s campus. The homeless man who was seated watched the car turn a corner as he pulled his jacket hood forward and dashed out into the rain, across a dark lawn that in the day was a perfectly manicured entryway to HP’s headquarters.
The man stopped at the corner of a building and pressed his back against the brick exterior in an attempt to make himself very flat as he watched a security camera in the corner move; as soon as the lens passed the alleyway he proceeded to cross.