Love Interest(48)
When my mom was twenty-four and fleeing London in the eighties, she was partly running from a receptionist position at her father’s wealth advisory firm. (Alex’s trust fund is undoubtedly somewhere very similar.) And even though I love numbers, and even though I work in finance, I have always, always understood why Mom couldn’t be there anymore. Dad says she described it as soulless.
Visions fill my head: getting to London only to be laid off right away, while I’ve fallen so hopelessly in love with the city that I’d do anything not to leave yet. Crawling to Notting Hill, the front door of Gran’s—a pinched-up woman I haven’t seen since Mom’s funeral—and asking her meekly if that receptionist position at Grandfather’s old business is still available.
“Is the acquisition Dougie Dawson’s idea?” I ask Tracy.
She shakes her head. “The offer came to us. We didn’t seek it out.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Can’t tell you that. I’m crossing a line as it is.”
“Are you going to say yes?” I ask.
“We have a fiduciary duty to consider it. The offer is high. Much higher than our company is worth. I have to decide on the best financial solution and present it to the board, emotions and people and personal feelings aside.” Tracy shrugs.
I’m angry at her, even though I know I have no right to be. Last we talked, Tracy admitted she didn’t think Dougie was fulfilling his own fiduciary duty, so I can hardly blame her for stepping up to the plate now. But I literally don’t know how to process this, and I don’t understand how it ties back to Robert Harrison. Did he leave so he wouldn’t have to witness the fallout? Did he not want the association of another failed company after his Harvard start-up flopped? And why did Robert challenge his son to see the BTH launch through if he knew this was a possible outcome? For Christ’s sake, Dougie now has a personal and a professional reason to obliterate Alex’s whole purpose here.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“I know you’ll keep it to yourself.” Tracy leans forward, lowers her voice. “Also, I’m kind of hoping someone in the weeds of our numbers might spot a solution I can’t.”
Challenge accepted. I’ll do anything possible to keep this acquisition from happening. I don’t want the heart and soul of our company to be torn apart. I want Bite the Hand to launch. I want my friends to keep their jobs. And I want to go to London on my own terms, no one else’s.
But if I go to London without Little Cooper, there won’t be a single familiar thing.
* * *
I’m sitting outside Saanvi’s office when Alex sprints around the corner, bottled tea in one hand, his notebook in the other, dressed in an Orvis half-zip and gray slacks. He’s panting just a little, lips parted, and when our eyes catch, all the nerves in my body concentrate in suspect places.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” I say back, and my heart thump-thump-thumps. Definitely not because I wanted to see him. More likely, it’s because I was dreading it. My conversation with Tracy has been following me like Eeyore’s dreary rain cloud since yesterday, and the sight of his trusting face might as well be a stab in the heart.
I want to warn him that his odds of a successful launch for Bite the Hand have gotten even slimmer. I want to apologize for using him for information when I’m not even sure what purpose it served Tracy at all.
I want to kiss him. Like, really badly, I want that.
Alex deposits his things on the table and sits down beside me in the other waiting chair. He peers through Saanvi’s glass walls where she’s speaking with Andre, Eric, and another salt-and-pepper-haired man I’ve never met.
“How was your weekend?” he asks.
“Lamer than yours. I’d give anything to experience the Cape Cod Target.”
“Be that as it may, we did eat enough seafood to kill you.”
“Charming.”
“Freddy’s mom lives in Cape Cod full-time,” Alex explains. “Before I moved to Seoul after college, I used to spend all my Thanksgivings with them.”
“Not with your aunt and cousins?”
Alex shakes his head. “Sometimes I felt like my aunt wanted some family stuff to be just her, her husband, and her kids. So, I asked Freddy one year if I could go with him. And it became a tradition.”
His father was probably only ever a couple of hours away, deep-frying a turkey with Linda in a country club they bought just for the occasion. I feel for her, too—spending Thanksgiving with the breathing reminder of your husband’s infidelity would probably suck—but Alex was just a kid.
He turns his body in the chair to face me. “You know,” he says, voice deep. “When I asked you to pick a plant for my balcony, I assumed it was going to be a later, through-the-front-door situation.”
I smirk, rapping my fingers on the computer in my lap. “The fire escape was more convenient. I didn’t want to drag the cosmos around until I saw you next.”
“Yes, dragging around a galaxy. A bit unwieldy.”
Saanvi’s door pushes open, and Alex and I rip our eyes off each other. We stand up, and Saanvi gestures for us to come in. Andre and Eric say a quick hello before leaving, but the other man stays seated as Saanvi closes the door and tells us to sit.