Chapter 17: Davis
Olivia: I miss you.
Olivia: I basically hate myself for feeling that way, but it’s true.
Olivia: Screw your honesty clause and screw you, Davis Ridgeway.
The messages arrive as I’m walking into the Boston office with a cup of coffee in one hand and my phone in the other. I almost drop my phone when I read those texts, but I manage to stop myself by a sheer miracle. The downside is that I end up accidentally squeezing my cup so hard that it bends slightly, and drips onto my hand and the cuff of my white shirt. Immediately, my father snaps at his assistant Shelby to clean it, which sends the poor woman to my side with a Tide pen that she wields like her life depends on it.
“I don’t see why you stopped to buy coffee,” he asserts, eyeing me stonily as he waits for his security to open the door to the Tower for him. “We have that here. If we didn’t have what you wanted, I could have sent someone.”
“I wanted to go for a walk.” It’s the honest truth. I do it whenever I can get away with it, knowing that my privacy is on borrowed time. My father hasn’t walked anywhere alone since he was in his early thirties, back when he wasn’t a billionaire and was just a normal man with a fledgling holding company, trying to turn the money he inherited into even more money. Nowadays, he travels with more security than Taylor Swift. One day, assuming the stock price holds, that’ll be me: escorted places and never a moment alone.
I know that it comes with the territory. It’s a small price to pay for the fortune that I’ve been preparing to inherit for my entire adult life. Still, I resent the hell out of it because right now all I want to do is be alone so I can respond to a text message from the Davenport-Ridgeway intern who just confessed that she doesn’t hate my guts.
“Take a walk now if you need to,” my father instructs as we push into the elevator with his entourage. “I need you sharp in this meeting.”
“I’m always sharp.”
He scrutinizes the stain on my cuff—the stain that Shelby is still frantically coating with her Tide pen—as if to say that a Ridgeway never spills coffee on his suits.
I turn to face her. “I’ll handle it, Shelb,” I say, nodding reassuringly at her.
She loves that. She loves that I’ve given her a nickname because it means that my father will be less likely to fire her. Little does she know that the number of times she’s seen my father commit minor white-collar crimes and cheat on wife after wife has basically given her job security for life.
When we arrive at the executive suite, I excuse myself from the group and head to the private bathroom. There, I pitch my coffee, run water over the stain on my shirt, and open up my text messages. There’s another one from Olivia.
Olivia: Please tell me that you’re not responding because you’re busy working and not because I’m completely pathetic for feeling this way.
Pathetic? I’m the pathetic one because this was exactly what I wanted: I wanted her to fall hard for me so I could pull the rug out from under her, or shatter the glass, or some other weird cliché that I don’t really understand. I wanted to hurt her. Yet now that I’m on the right track, I’m regretting this decision.
It was somewhere between Olivia attempting to leave me on Saturday night and her gamely allowing me to watch her be pierced that I realized: Call it vengeance. Call it retribution. Call it justice—call it literally anything. It’s all bullshit. The only thing that’s happening here is me, again, letting this woman get the best of me.
And it feels so good.
I glance up at the mirror and look at my reflection. The man staring back at me still catches me by surprise after all these years. For most of my life, the man in the reflection was blushing and shy and chubby and never knew what the hell to do with his hands. He got tongue tied in front of anyone new and he had memorized all the side effects of alprazolam before he even got his driver’s license. He blended into the background, completely forgettable if he weren’t so big and towering.
The man in the reflection today is unrecognizable. Chiseled and sharply-dressed and so damn commanding. He owns board rooms and categorically gets shit done. He’s a man of few words. Smiling? No time for it. He looks like he rides dragons to work or fights them—whichever is scarier.
This man is going to fall for the same damn woman who single-handedly broke the man who used to be in my reflection. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Or actually…this was exactly how this was supposed to go…right?
God damn it; there’s no play in the Ridgeway book for this scenario. I’m not a villain. I’m not a manipulator or a schemer or even remotely good at, like, board games that require an iota of strategy. I was an idiot for thinking I could pull this off.
But I can’t fall for her again—not again. Not again, not again, not again.
Me: Olivia.
Me: You should be working.
Olivia: Is this your way of telling me that I’m failing at this internship?
Me: No. This is my way of telling you that your time is better spent doing anything other than thinking about me and my magical tongue.
Me: It’s difficult, I know, but maybe you can get that horny, desperate brain of yours to focus if you try.
There. Shut it down. Keep it about sex—sex and nothing more. Make her hate you. Make her hate herself for not hating you. Keep it about sex. Say goodbye at the end of the summer. Let her go—let yourself go. Finally.
After pocketing my phone, I head to the boardroom, where my father is already seated next to Gregory. I slide into my seat on the same side of the table, opposite three other members of the company’s senior leadership team: our Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer.
To be frank, I have no business having a seat at this table. There are a hundred people more powerful than me at this company, and it’s only nepotism that has brought me here today. I know it, the five other people at this table know it, and yet they all greet me like I’m so much more than a lowly VP.
I made peace with nepotism a long time ago. It is what it is. Plus, I wasn’t about to say to my father, “Listen, I know that you could fast-track me to the exact job that I want to have one day, but I’m going to go ahead and take an entry-level data-entry job and spend an additional twenty years getting to where I want to be.” Even if I had done that, there was never a possibility for me to make my own way in the world; my father is a billionaire. I was never, ever going to be self-made. Even from infancy, I was already leaps and bounds ahead of most kids my age purely because my mother had a stress-free pregnancy thanks to the in-house chefs feeding her an organic, omega-3-laden, pregnancy-optimized meal plan. It took me a few years, but I had to come to terms with my reality. I’m privileged: the big P word that other wealthy people only utter in whispers. Once I acknowledged that, I could avoid being a monumental asshole.
I wish that Olivia could understand that better. Her text earlier got under my skin, to say the least. And it was, surprisingly, not the one about missing me. It was actually the one about her assuming that she was failing. The thought is laughable. Eventually, I need to remind her that half the people at this company are this far along in their careers due to nepotism or privilege or other shit that’s equally unfair.
“Davis,” my father says.
Surprised, I look up and realize that I’ve been staring at my notebook with a pen in my hand for the last few seconds, all while my father has apparently been trying to get my attention. When I scan the table, I see that all eyes are on me.
“Pardon my distraction,” I say, careful not to apologize in front of my father. “And thanks for your patience.”
“I was asking if you could kick us off with an overview of the London targets you’re pursuing,” he probes.
That’s right. We’re here to talk about M&A, as usual, and to acknowledge the absolutely disastrous debacle that took place in the spring with the failed Libra acquisition. It’s my job, as the Vice President for Mergers & Acquisitions for Financial Services, to essentially salvage the situation.
Succinctly, I give my update on the two targets that Olivia has been preparing analyses about for the past month: TruEarn and FundRight. At this moment, I’m leaning hardtowards FundRight, but it’s going to be a tough buy for Davenport-Ridgeway. FundRight’s CEO doesn’t want to sell, particularly not to Davenport-Ridgeway, so my trip to London in a couple of weeks to meet the CEO in-person is going to be a make-or-break event.
When I explain all of this to the leadership team, they’re receptive if not excited (or as close to excited as a bunch of old, corporate dinosaurs can get). Excellent research on this, Davis. I’m sure you’ll get the job done, Davis. We have full confidence in you, Davis.