As well as one of my closest friends. Which meant that I knew her tells well enough to doubt most of the words currently flowing out of her mouth.
“Second: the representatives from Harkness, our new lender, are not enemies. Harkness has a long history of uplifting tech and healthcare startups, and that’s why they’re here. Their objective is, of course, to conduct due diligence and make sure that their financial interests are met, but our work—your work—has always been impeccable. They’ll be setting up meetings with some of you, and you should make them your priority. And I want to make sure that you recognize them if you see them around: Dr. Minami Oka, Dr. Sullivan Jensen, Mr. Eli Killgore, and Mr. Conor . . .”
“Rue?” Tisha asked in a low whisper.
I didn’t reply, but she continued anyway.
“That driver’s license you sent last night?”
I nodded. The floor beneath my feet was gone, dropped to the core of the earth. I was sliding right through it, and nothing was going to break my fall.
“The pic of that guy . . . his face.”
I nodded again. It was, undeniably, a memorable face. Striking. Attractive, I’d told him, meaning it. Short, wavy—no, curly hair, just this side of too wild. Square jaw. Strong, aquiline nose that sat somewhere between the Roman and Greek civilizations, deep in the Adriatic. Long vowels and the occasional dropped consonant.
“And his name. Killgore.”
I’d teased him about that, and it had felt like a first. Joking around with people required a degree of ease that usually took me decades to reach, but with Eli it had been simple, for no reason that I could discern.
He was just some ordinary man, and last night he’d exuded the same energy he did now: nice guy, radically unafraid, fundamentally comfortable with himself and others. He’d kept it well into our car ride, that unsettling calm. Meanwhile, I’d been barely able to tear my eyes from him, my hands shaking as I stepped into the circle of his warm, woodsy scent to write my number on his palm.
“That man on the stage. It’s him, right?”
I nodded one last time, unable to speak.
“Okay. Yeah. Wow.” Tisha made to massage her eyes, then remembered her elaborate makeup. “That’s quite a . . . I believe the scientific word for it is ‘coinkydink.’”
Is it? Could it be? Acid rose in my throat, because I wasn’t sure coincidences of this magnitude existed. Had Eli known who I was? Where I worked? I stared, hoping an answer would appear on his face. He was wearing glasses today. Dark rimmed. The most ridiculous of Clark Kent’s disguises.
“I can’t believe they sent four lender representatives,” Jay said, breaking through the fog in my brain.
I turned to him, dazed. “Is that weird?”
“They don’t even own us yet, do they? It seems like a lot of resources to expend on a company they haven’t even acquired, but”—he shrugged—“what do I know? I’m just a humble country lab technician.”
“You were born in Lisbon and have a master’s degree from NYU,” Tisha pointed out. “Maybe they just like to travel together, entourage-style. Share an omelet chef and a CVS card.”
“Are the four . . . are they all employed by the private equity?” I asked.
“I just looked up the Harkness website—they are the founding partners. I understand that they want to send someone to check on whether the covenants are being met—”
“The what now?” Tisha sounded done with this fucking day. I could vigorously relate.
“You know, those promises you make when you sign a contract? They give us the money; in exchange we deliver a partridge in a pear tree? Why are the partners here, though? Why not send a VP? Is Kline that big a deal for them? It just sounds a bit sus.”
Tisha and I exchanged a long, heavy glance.
“We need to talk to Florence,” I whispered. “In private.”
“Do you still have the keys to her office? From her birthday, when we stuffed it with those ‘you’re old as shit’ balloons?”
I stood. “I do.”
“Great. Jay, see you later.”
“If I don’t get fired, and lose my visa, and end up deported out of the country.”
“Yeah.” Tisha waved him goodbye. “Try not to walk into the sea, okay?”
We left the room just as Florence invited everyone to keep calm and return to their workplaces.
It had all started with fermentation. Which, admittedly, was a less-than-enthralling topic—even for someone like me, with a relentless passion for chemical engineering and an unwieldy interest in the production of ethanol. Still, a couple of boring chemical reactions had changed the trajectory of food microbiology, and Florence Kline was the person who got credit for that.
Less than a decade earlier, Florence had been a professor at UT Austin with a really, really good idea for how to perfect a process that could cheaply convert food waste into biofuels on a mass scale. Because she was a faculty member, UT’s labs had been at her disposal, but Florence had known that any sort of discovery made on campus grounds, using campus resources, would end in the university owning the resulting patent. And Florence was not about that.
So she’d rented lab space at a nearby facility. She’d done her own work. She’d filed her own patent, and founded her own company. Others had trickled in later: private grants, angel investors, venture capitalists, a handful, then dozens, then hundreds of employees. The company had expanded, perfected Florence’s revolutionary tech, and brought it to market.
Then, about four years ago, I’d jumped on board.
Florence and I both lived in Austin at the time, but by a fluke of fate we first met in Chicago, at the annual conference of the Society for Food Technology. I was dutifully standing by my poster, wearing a frumpy cardigan and a pair of Tisha’s slacks that dug too tightly into my waist, and was bored out of my mind.
Alone.
The academic networking game required a healthy number of interpersonal graces, of which I had none. In fact, by the time I reached grad school, I’d been set in my ways for over a decade—ways that entailed concealing my shyness, self-consciousness, and general inability to offer rewarding social interactions to another human being, mostly behind a standoffish facade. But people were hard—to read, to understand, to please. At some point in my youth, without quite meaning to do so, I’d gone from being incapable of carrying out a conversation to coming across as though I did not want to be approached for conversation, not ever, not by anyone and not under any circumstances. I still remembered the day in middle school when the realization dawned on me: If people perceived me as aloof and detached, then they would want to keep their distance. And if they kept their distance, then they wouldn’t notice how nervous and blundering and inadequate I was.
A net win, in my humble opinion. A form of masking, in my therapist’s professional one. She thought I was hiding my real self and squashing down my feelings like jumbo marshmallows, but it had been so damn long, I wasn’t so sure there was anything to hide inside me. The disconnect I constantly felt toward the rest of the world was unlikely to go anywhere, and whether it was real or not, it shrouded me with a comforting sense of security.