“Who has the biggest air force?”
“I don’t know. The UK. Germany. France. Italy.”
“What about Spain?”
Avery thought a moment. “They’ve got the planes but not enough money to repair them and keep them flight-ready. Their economy has been in crisis for years.” She nodded. “So we fly over Spain, roll the dice, try to get to Shetland.”
“Speaking of which, what happens then? Surely they’ll shoot us down.”
“I’m working on that.”
Before he could ask, she stood and made her way back to the cockpit.
Desmond adjusted the rolled-up blanket under Peyton’s head and watched her sleep for a moment.
He closed his eyes, trying to remember his past.
The SciNet IPO was a turning point in Desmond’s life, in ways he never anticipated. The stock soared. On paper, his stake, a little less than one percent of the company, was worth 3.29 million dollars. In reality, all of his options were subject to an employee lockup provision that prevented him from selling shares or exercising options for six months after the IPO. They were the longest six months of his life, and everyone else’s at SciNet.
Going public changed the company. The management team now constantly obsessed over the stock price and investor relations. Quarterly earnings became the only events that really mattered. They issued press releases all the time, hoping to garner more media attention.
Where they had thought strategically before, taken risks, and tried to build the business for the long term, now they played it safe, trying to hit their growth and revenue numbers (there were still no profits to report). It was the beginning of the end, and Desmond knew it. When the lockup period expired in August, the stock had drifted higher. A rising tide in 1999 had lifted all boats, most of all shares of hot dot-com companies. His shares were worth $7,840,000. He sold every one of them and resigned. Including the proceeds from his stock options in two other companies that had gone public, and one that had been acquired, he had netted just over nine million dollars in the last year.
Peyton had insisted that whatever he did with his shares in the companies, she would do too. He sold everything and put the proceeds in two separate bank accounts.
Separate wasn’t what she wanted—in banking or otherwise. She had recently asked him to move in with her. He was hesitant, still afraid he would hurt her. But saying no would hurt her too. They bought a small cottage-style home in Palo Alto Hills. For him, it was the easiest move ever. He simply hooked up the Airstream, backed it into the driveway, and carried his few belongings inside.
Despite their windfall, Peyton didn’t change one bit. She kept going to med school, studied her heart out, and decorated the house in her free time. She painted every room. Put wallpaper in the half bath. There was always a home improvement project for the weekend. Desmond was pretty good at them, but he figured half of her motivation was to give him something to focus on. In the months after he quit SciNet, he mostly lay on the couch and read. Or surfed the web. The last six months while SciNet was public had been grueling. He’d worked long hours on endless deadlines. The year before hadn’t been much better. Taken together, he felt like he’d crammed twenty years of work into eighteen months. He was burned out. But that wasn’t the full extent of his problems.
He had believed that financial freedom would be a breakthrough for him. That he would feel differently. He’d thought that on the other side of that train tunnel he’d finally relax and open himself fully to life—and in particular, to love. Love without fear, love with Peyton. But the wall was still there. He felt like a greyhound that had run the racetrack his entire life, chasing a stuffed rabbit, and had finally caught it—only to discover that the thing he had been chasing was of no use to him, that it had all been a fool’s errand. He now knew the truth: his true issue was far deeper, at a more fundamental level.
He read texts on psychology and researched it on the internet. Peyton became increasingly worried, and presented a myriad of solutions.
“You need to exercise more, Des. You’ve been physically active your whole life.”
He got a gym membership and began running with her every morning. They swam every Saturday. It didn’t help. Neither did getting outside.
“Maybe you need to actually interact with people,” she said. “I mean, being here all day alone would be tough on anyone.”
He joined a book club. Began taking classes at Stanford on subjects that interested him: astrophysics and psychology. He went to lunch at least twice a week with old colleagues. But he felt no different.
Peyton begged him to see a doctor.
“I feel like I’m watching you slip away, Des. Please. Do it for me.”