Sabrina put her head in her hands. “Fuck!” she said, louder than she’d meant to. Isabel looked alarmed. “Sorry. I hate to do this but I’m going to have to leave in an hour or so—is there any way we could push that meeting to tomorrow? Or could I call in?”
Isabel scrunched up her face. “Hmm. I don’t know?” Isabel glanced at her computer screen and made another annoyed face. She typed something on her keyboard. “Mack wants me to come by. Listen, do what you have to do, okay?” Isabel got up.
Sabrina sighed and texted Dan back: Not really, but I guess I have no choice. She waited a few minutes. He didn’t respond.
4
Down the Runway
HE NEEDED TO talk to Isabel. He clicked over to Slack, the chat client that everyone at TakeOff used to communicate with one another all day.
Mack: do you have a second
Isabel: what’s up
Mack: no I mean, can you come by my office
Isabel: k
Mack shut his office door behind her, even though the interior was still visible to everyone. At least they wouldn’t be able to hear what he was saying. There was a look on Isabel’s face that he couldn’t quite parse. It wasn’t exactly confusion, but—impatience? No. He had to be imagining that.
“So what’s up?” she asked. Her expression said Can you hurry up because I’m in the middle of something really important.
Okay. He wasn’t imagining it.
The first year she’d worked for him, he’d kept her scrupulously off-limits. Isabel was one of those women who had never not been pretty, whose blond hair was always perfectly tousled, whose legs were long and taut from years of playing field hockey and now looked amazing in heels. And she exuded the kind of confidence you have only when you can wear an oversize sack dress to work (“fashion”) and still look hot. In that year, every time he caught himself looking a little too long at her, he reminded himself that she was not only too young but also his assistant, which in and of itself meant there were a thousand reasons why it was a bad idea. Besides, he was seeing other people, most of whom were more on his level (among them a swimsuit model with a PhD in molecular biology and a former Miss America finalist who had gone to Yale and then started a nonprofit that taught entrepreneurship to kids in the Bronx).
But then one night, she’d stayed late to help him work on a presentation he had the next day, and she smelled really good, and she smiled at him in a way that made him think, Oh, okay, and before he knew it they were hooking up right there in his office. After that it just kind of continued in secret. They had never referred to themselves as boyfriend and girlfriend; they’d never even had any kind of a define-the-relationship talk. No one at work knew. Mack continued to see other people and he assumed Isabel did too, though he preferred not to think about it. Lately, though, Mack had started allowing himself to fantasize about what life might be like with Isabel in it, like for real, like Sunday-brunch-and-weekends-away-and-cooking-dinner-together for real. No more sneaking around, no more having to keep a Tinder profile up and go on halfhearted dates and have halfhearted sex with randos just so he could tell himself that he didn’t really like her.
He realized they had been silent for at least a minute when she finally said, “So you wanted to talk about September numbers?”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Also…I’m finishing up my presentation for Gramercy today, and I was wondering if you might be able to…help me.” He smiled in a way that he hoped seemed flirtatious.
The thing was, he really did need her help with the Gramercy presentation. Because last night, when he couldn’t fall asleep, a troubling, persistent thought had entered his mind: Was there any possibility that he wouldn’t get the money? The company was in the tiniest—really, the tiniest—danger of running out of cash in the near future. As in, the next-three-months near future. Five million dollars in venture funding just didn’t go as far as it used to, especially when you were trying to launch a revolutionary new product and your investors were constantly on your ass. The new version of the famous Glengarry Glen Ross line “Always be closing” was “Always be scaling,” but the problem with that slogan was that Mack still hadn’t quite figured out how to constantly be scaling when the company was bringing in very little actual revenue. Bigger, faster; the more disruptive, the better. They were just weeks away from launching TakeOff 2.0, which was going to change the entire self-help field, he was sure of it, but in the meantime—somehow—the company was down to its last million. Barely one month of runway. The company could survive on lines of credit and called-in favors for a little while, true. But not that long a while.
The scariest thing was that he hadn’t even realized how quickly the money was disappearing. But there were hiring costs, and salaries, and rent, and computers, and a launch party. There was the team of cognitive psychologists they’d hired to consult on the app, engineers who needed huge signing bonuses because it was impossible to hire them in New York (all the really good ones were in the Bay Area). There was the design consultant who told him which desks to buy and where to put them. There were snacks and lunches and happy hours. There were all the things that came up every single day that he never could have anticipated. And now so much of the money was just…gone.