Dan Koontz
The I.P.O.
A Novel
To the loves of my life:
Kyla, Emily, Ashley and Claire
CHAPTER 1
His eyes snapped open as if spring loaded as his head shot up from the thin foam pillow. Despite the chill that permeated the orphanage barracks half an hour before sunrise, he threw off his covers and sat straight up, sweating and out of breath, tenting his scrawny arms on the cot’s metal frame.
A quick look around the converted gymnasium confirmed that all the other kids were still asleep. Good. He knew from experience that this night’s sleep was over. At least he’d have the shower to himself before the hot water ran out.
A little over three months had passed since the day Ryan Tyler, Jr. had spent every subsequent day trying to forget. But as he stared down at the shower drain, warm water tumbling off his hair in sheets, he found himself returning yet again to the last memory he had of his parents, on their way to pick him up early from daycare on his seventh birthday.
In a matter of seconds, he was all the way back, standing beside his teacher just inside the center’s glass double doors, searching expectantly through the pouring rain.
An impatient grin materialized on his lips as the form of his dad’s Honda Civic gradually took shape through the torrent. A hazy rhythmic flash of orange joined the cone of white light from the headlights as the car slowed, approaching the entrance to the parking lot.
Soon he was able to make out his mother’s face in the passenger seat as the light from an oncoming car shined through the front windshield. She had just started to raise her hand to a wave, and a smile had begun to take shape on her face, as she briefly made eye contact with her son.
The light on her face grew gradually brighter, until it almost appeared that the sun was shining, only on her. This was the image he had seen every morning since, just before being jolted awake.
Then she was gone.
A cannonblast, followed by the screech of tires, several rumbling thuds that shook the floor, and finally the mundane static of the falling rain.
Ryan’s heart stopped. He reflexly jumped at the door, threw it open and bolted out to the edge of the parking lot.
Wide-eyed and panting, blinking away the rain, he stared fifty yards down the street to the glowing tail lights of a massive Chevy Suburban that dwarfed the unrecognizable remains of his dad’s eight-year-old Honda Civic just beyond.
After a brief pause, he forged ahead at a slow, deliberate pace, continuing on instinctively toward his parents, scared to death to see what awaited him — no one could have survived that impact — but compelled to go forward, as if drawn to them magnetically.
Broken glass crunched underfoot as he approached the rear fender of the Suburban. His chest felt hollow. His heart seemed to have slowed to a stop.
Just as he attempted to peer around the back end of the SUV to the mangled mass of metal and fiberglass that had been his parents’ car, his teacher rushed in from behind, scooped him up in her arms, and took off running as fast as she could back to the daycare center.
He screamed a desolate scream of desperation, stretching both arms out over her shoulders reaching for his parents, futilely giving everything he had to free himself from her serpentine hold, as he watched his whole world slowly disappear from sight.
“Turn that off! You’re going to wake up the whole wing,” one of the orphanage nannies hissed. “And what makes you so special that you get all the hot water?”
Snapping back to the present, he quickly shut the faucet off. He hadn’t soaped himself yet, but he really hadn’t done anything to get dirty the day before.
“Now, get dressed,” the nanny added with just slightly more compassion in her voice. “You’ve got a visitor.”
His expression brightened a little at the thought. It didn’t register with him that it wasn’t even six o’clock yet.
James Prescott scanned one final email as he slugged down the last ounce of his first coffee of the morning. Before reaching the end of the message, he quick-replied a simple “no.”
He didn’t care what favor he owed to whom or what kind of sob story a supposedly close friend was selling him about how much he needed this. He wasn’t about to do anything that might jeopardize his first IPO on the opening day of an entirely new market he’d spent the last 25 years almost single-handedly bringing to fruition.
“Good luck, honey,” his wife called out, still in bed.
“Thanks,” he yelled back, adding under his breath, “I won’t need it.”
James Prescott had long maintained a closer marriage to his idea than to his wife — an idea that had come to him as an undergraduate in economics at Princeton. An idea that would gradually grow to consume him. He had submitted it as his senior project, earning him the only failing grade he had ever received. But that had only hardened his resolve. With time, he’d grown to appreciate the F, which added character to a transcript otherwise weighed down by the monotony of A’s.
After graduation, he’d been a standout in a brief stint with Goldman Sachs, building as many wealthy or likely-to-be-wealthy contacts as he could. Then came the hard part — essentially putting his idea on hold for the four years it would take to complete the combined JD-MBA program at Northwestern. But he knew he’d need the credentials.
Four long years later, after countless hours of independent research of the legal, ethical, financial and marketing nuances of his idea, he was finally ready to start. Within a week of graduation, James Prescott, JD, MBA tactfully turned down multiple lucrative job offers and raised just enough capital to turn his idea into an entity.
He named it Avillage.
As he built the foundation of the fledgling company, gradually adding investors and employees but resolutely refusing to take on partners, he forced himself to take just enough time off to find a wife. To build the popular and political support he’d need to take his project past the developmental stage, he knew that a wife and, eventually, a family would be necessities.
With a very specific target in mind, he sought someone attractive but not sexy, motherly without being homely, intelligent but with no specific career aspirations, conservative but not political, Christian but not a zealot, whistle clean on a rigorous background check and, most of all, desperate for children. His search was quick.
An athletic 6’1” with dark hair, dark deep-set eyes, and a masculine cleft to his chin, offset by boyish dimples that made an appearance each time he smiled — a deceptively warm smile — he was a charmer (to the point that even those who suspected he was schmoozing them couldn’t really resent him for it). A clear “catch” by any young woman’s standards — or her family’s.
He married Jessica Prescott, nee Aronson, in June of 2012, before an audience of the most influential men and women he could figure out a way to contact.
Just prior to their second anniversary, Jessica gave birth to John Prescott, followed less than two years later by Jacqueline Prescott. With a healthy son and daughter, there was just one more step he would need to take to complete his family. The most important step.
While away on a business trip in Los Angeles, unbeknownst to his wife, he underwent a vasectomy.
No longer capable of fathering a child, he took any and every opportunity to gush to his wife and their acquaintances about his strong desire to have more children.
After a year of “trying” to get his wife pregnant, he tearfully and ashamedly confessed to her that he’d gone to see a urologist and had discovered that his sperm count was low — they weren’t going to be able to conceive again. This, he explained, was not uncommon as men entered their 40s.