No Match for Her

Prologue

C

harlie

T

hree Years Ago

I

t’s her laugh that catches my attention.

I hear a chorus of tiny bells, the lilting symphony of piano keys and windchimes late in the summer when the breeze is mild and warm. One of those days when all you want to do is stay outside until the sun drops, casting a warm pinkish glow on ordinary things.

Her laugh sounds pink.

It reminds me of the kind of joy I felt in my bones as a kid when I had a new idea and couldn’t sprint home fast enough to make it happen.

I sure haven’t felt that way lately. And not today.

Most of the time, I don’t know what I feel. Stress, I guess—the weight of accomplishment and expectations ruining what might otherwise be a productive afternoon. I should be building the company I’ve dreamed of since I started messing with circuit boards and computer code two dozen years ago.

I shouldn’t be rethinking decisions that have already been made.

But I think about everything, especially the dreams. I’m a planner, so I work through scenarios, gaming them out with all possible outcomes to be sure I’ve chosen the best one. Even when I should be losing myself in an audiobook out on a run, I can’t stop my goddamned brain from wondering what if?

What if I should’ve when I could’ve?

Doubt will be the death of those dreams. I’ll have to try to remember that when all I can see are the question marks and second guesses.

If my thoughts sound wooden, it’s because they are—thought and overthought so many times they’ve become petrified.

Just keep moving forward, doing what’s expected, and everything will be okay.

More than okay. My virtual reality company, ViviTech, is about to be go public in a stock offering worth billions. Yes, there’s a “b” at the front of that word. I will be a billionaire in a matter of weeks.

And I’d be the biggest douchebag asshole on the planet if I complained. So, I won’t.

I will simply say that the past few years have been a grind. What started as a senior thesis in college with a bunch of my knucklehead computer nerd friends has turned into a twenty-four/seven life.

I’m not being overly dramatic.

Our joint paper on the subject of whether machines could learn emotions opened doors for all of us. Tech incubators and venture capitalists came calling and sent us all off in different directions once we’d turned in our research.

Two of my fellow knuckleheads developed an app that uses tech to predict who’s most susceptible to different kinds of cancers using a couple drops of blood and powerful computers. I founded a virtual reality company that makes a whole new category of sports games and allows astronauts to virtually explore Mars and run experiments there using rovers in real time.

The fourth member of our dude group started a landscape design firm. It has nothing to do with technology or machine learning unless drip watering on a timer counts as high tech. And he’s probably the happiest of the bunch, married to a pastry chef who tries out new recipes on him daily and doesn’t mind when he comes home smelling like fertilizer.

He zigged, I zagged. Until now, I had no problem with spending all my time on algorithms. If managed correctly, they’re predictable.

I like predictable.

So do shareholders. They want predictable profits and growth—and it’s my job to produce.

Billions of dollars will be changing hands based on work I’ve completed and bold promises I’ve made about what I’ll continue to do. Investment dollars will allow my company to grow beyond anything I’ve dreamed of, but every future decision I make will be with shareholders in mind.

A deal with the devil.

No wonder I’m stressed. No wonder I’m grasping at anything that will lighten my load.

No wonder that today, when my mind is deep in a trough of investor questions I’d rather not answer, the melodic laugh kind of saves my life.

It reminds me that in some alternate dimension from where I currently eat, breathe, and sleep my work, some things are still beautiful.

And for some people, still funny.

It’s a foreign sound at my company, despite what I’ve done to make our workspace a pleasant environment with a ping-pong table, flexible hours, and free vending machine food. People like coming to work, but they don’t laugh at work. Not like that.

So, even though I have a hundred emails in my inbox, I leave my glass-walled office and walk through the cubicle farm in search of the sound that warmed me from the inside out.

I’m certain of the source before I hear a second peal that’s even more gleeful than the first. It has to be her—the auburn-haired woman in the red dress standing near one of the lunch tables in our central common area. She’s grinning at my newest hire, Tatum Finley.

Long, dark red waves hang down her back with bronze highlights catching light from the overhead LEDs. I’m struck by the need to put the correct name to the color—copper, russet, chestnut?

The dress defies description, both tastefully covering most of her body in a hip-hugging knit fabric and screaming sexy at the same time. Even from across the room, I can see her long lashes brush her cheeks when she blinks over greenish eyes that could easily be gemstones.

It’s none of my business who Tatum is talking to, and I’m not the kind of arrogant jerk who’d walk over and puff my feathers in front of her just because I founded the company. One of my project managers, Paul, is already positioning his weak, slip of a body between Tatum and her guest. Given his lack of stature, his eyes are right at chest level, and he’s not even embarrassed to gawk. If he gets any closer, he could bite one of her breasts like an apple.

To her credit, the woman says something I don’t hear, but it has him scurrying away like a rodent under the heel of a boot.

A moment later, I hear a repeat of the delightful carefree sound that called me from my office like a siren song. She’s laughing at Tatum, who’s waltzing in front of her with her hands on her hips, her hair flipping from side to side, and a wild sway in her hips. They both break up over whatever they’re talking about, and I feel like a stalker creeper for lingering by the snacks watching them.

For a split second, she looks in my direction, the deep pink of her lips parting to reveal an open-mouthed smile that confirms I was right—there’s something joyful about her. Something uninhibited, as though she isn’t weighed down by a job she hates or a husband who she married for the wrong reasons. Her laugh tells me she’s happy.

Not that you’re projecting…

She just seems…content.

Of course, I don’t know her at all, and I’m reading into the things I want to be true. But isn’t that how it always is? We seize on something and believe in it without knowing whether reality will bear out our hopes.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the hopes are enough to drive reality.

And maybe it’s because I’ve been working endless, god-awful hours getting the company ready for its initial public offering—listening to power players in the banking industry tell me what they think I want to hear about my brilliance because it will translate into millions of dollars for them—but I could use a little joy and contentment right now.

Berta, the Icelandic model who I married a year ago, has just asked for a divorce. I know she waited for the options to vest before bailing because she told me. I almost don’t blame her for making a shrewd financial play, especially since I knew we weren’t in love by the honeymoon.

I dove headlong into the marriage anyway because I’m good at fixing broken things. It’s taken me a year of therapy to learn the distinction between broken machines and broken people, and I’m still not sure I understand.

Now I’ll stick to the technical things I can repair using logic. I don’t need a relationship in order to live a meaningful life.

Still…I do need to hear that laughter.

Its surprising warmth has me relaxing the smallest degree about all the things on my massive, awful to-do list. Who knew another person could make a sound with the power to do that? Not me.

The fridge has a selection of drinks—ginger tonics, green smoothies, seltzers, cans side-by-side of Red Bull and Diet Red Bull that once launched an office-wide debate—and I take my time deciding on a cranberry seltzer. And because I skipped lunch, I scoop some raw almonds from one of the glass jars into a blue bowl that looks like someone sculpted it out of Play-Doh.

Then I linger in hopes of one more peal of laughter to lift me out of work hell, one more look at this red-haired beauty before I head back to my office for another coding marathon.

Still lost in my head and dreading the calls I need to make when I get back to my office, I nearly miss Tatum and her friend walk past. I don’t even take advantage of the moment and get a closer look at the cherubic features of the woman whose hair bounces as she fades out of range.

I’m left only with a lingering citrus scent that makes me want to grow lemon and orange trees all around my house so I can prolong the memory of her.

Glancing over to the table where the two of them sat a moment ago, my eyes snag on a slip of paper, maybe what they were laughing at, maybe not. But I’m curious enough to walk over and look.

It’s a page from one of the notepads we have all over the office. Rule one in working with people who are paid to find new solutions to old problems is to make it easy to capture the barest whiff of an idea before it’s lost.

That’s the work I love—the creativity, the collaboration, the ideas.

Do I even want the company to go public? Does it even matter? What if I want to own a sports team or a piano bar or an eco-travel company?

Shut up, you whiny, lucky bastard who’s about to have the biggest IPO to hit Silicon Valley in a year.

Yeah, I need to keep my complaints to myself, bury them deep, and forget about them.

The first thing I notice on the paper is the drawing—it’s a pencil-scrawled image of a hockey player sweeping a puck into the net. It’s highly detailed, surprisingly so for what’s basically a doodle.

She drew this?

Beneath it is a quote I know to be from Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Yes, you do.

It’s exactly what I need to hear—or read—today. Not because I need courage before I take the company public. But because of all the other things I want to do someday.

Shareholders? Fuck ‘em.

Sometimes, the universe provides the exact inspiration at the exact time a person needs it. Sometimes, it’s provided by a mysterious redhead with a musical laugh. Either way, I’m smart enough to know it when I see it.

I understand that I’m holding something in my hands that could change my career trajectory if I do things right. It may even change my life. So I’m grateful for something a total stranger scribbled on a page, having no idea it would speak to me in a moment when I needed clarity.

I also know I need to see this woman again. When the time is right. When I have my life in order.

Popping the top on the cranberry seltzer, I take a long sip.

When I have my life in order.

Sure. I have no fucking idea when that will be.