I ran a hand through my hair. Because it’s mine, I thought, or it should be. It should be fucking mine.
“All right,” Dane said, breaking into my fog of thought. “Where the hell are we going, Noah?”
Noah looked him up and down as the car pulled into Michigan Avenue traffic. “I told you to dress for an important meeting.”
Dane shrugged. “This is how I dress for important meetings.”
Noah rolled his eyes. “Should I be glad you at least aren’t wearing the Duran Duran T-shirt you wore the entire year you were sixteen?”
“It was vintage,” Dane said. “Besides, it doesn’t fit me anymore.”
It wouldn’t. Dane hadn’
t gained weight, but he’d bulked up since he was a teenager, and a lot in the past few years. He said that working out relieved his boredom, but I had the feeling Dane finally got tired of being the scrawny, nerdy programmer. The current version of him could get women by the dozens if he tried, but with his fuck-off personality he still never got laid.
“Okay, fine,” Noah said. “You can dress like a slob, but keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.”
“Done and done,” Dane said, looking almost pleased.
“Hey,” Alex said, looking out the window. “This is the old neighborhood.”
I looked. He was right. We were in the South Side, and we’d come to the neighborhood we’d lived in years ago. All four of us had been born within a mile of here; the house I grew up in was only six blocks away, though there was nothing there for me anymore. No memories, no family, nothing.
Then it hit me. “We’re going to the old building,” I said. “Our place.”
There was silence in the car. Noah didn’t deny it.
I looked at him. His handsome, open face was quiet now, almost solemn.
At fifteen, all four of us had left home. We all had different reasons. My mother was a single mother working two jobs, who wanted me out of the house. Alex’s father was hitting him. Dane’s parents had pretty much forgotten about him. And Noah had rich parents who hated him.
Noah had talked the school janitor into telling the landlord that he was Noah’s father, that the rest of us were cousins, and that it was all on the up-and-up. He’d signed the papers, and Alex had promptly learned how to forge the janitor’s signature anywhere else we needed it.
We lived in that apartment for seven years. It was in a shit neighborhood and it was nothing to write home about, but we loved it. And sure, we were four teenage guys who didn’t have much money and weren’t particularly clean. The place was still home until Dane’s software made us rich, we started Tower VC, and we moved out to spread across the country.
“What are we doing, Noah?” I asked as all the familiar buildings slid by outside the window, all the familiar streets. “Why are we going back to the old place now?”
Noah scratched his chin, but finally he answered. “Because the entire building is for sale,” he said. “And we’re going to buy it.”
Three hours later, I let myself into Samantha’s hotel room. I was tired and drained in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. The trip down Memory Lane had been good, bad, and everything in between.
Noah was right: our old place was for sale. Not just the apartment we’d rented, but the whole building. It was in even worse shape than it had been in when we left; it needed updates, upgrades, and renovations. Probably several million dollars’ worth. The real estate itself was going for next to nothing, but that didn’t mean the place was cheap.
The cost didn’t matter. If the building wasn’t bought, it was going to be condemned. Noah wanted us to buy it, renovate it, put the Tower VC Chicago offices on the top floor, and rent the rest out.
It was a nice idea. It was also an idea that would lose money—lots of money. Which was the opposite of what a venture capital firm is supposed to do.
We’d debated it for over an hour, sitting in a diner long after the real estate agent had left. Noah said the money didn’t matter. That was typical Noah, who liked to roll the dice and hope for the best. The problem was that the rest of us liked money—a lot. We’d worked fucking hard to earn what we had, and Tower VC was built on Dane’s genius, Alex’s muscle, and my sales and finance acumen. It was easy for Noah to dismiss money when it was the rest of us who had made him rich without his parents.
And at the same time, he was right. Tower had a healthy bank account and access to almost unlimited loans. This one project, as expensive as it was, wouldn’t sink us. And if we didn’t buy the building, it would be gone. A piece of our past, reduced to rubble.
“We can’t let that happen,” Noah said. “Fuck the money. Let’s save it.”
Alex had crossed his arms. “I didn’t get into business to lose money on a bunch of sentimental shit. You want a keepsake, go buy an old record or something. I’m out.”
Dane voted for the project. He was a Chicago boy to the bone, and he didn’t want to see a piece of Chicago condemned.
I voted against it.