He finished breakfast, walked back, and spent an hour on the couch going through the IRS docuntation one more ti. The paperwork was clean — Diana’s attorney had been thorough in a way that communicated this was not their first ti structuring sothing sensitive. The backdated seed round sat in the docuntation as solidly as if it had always been there, the kind of paperwork that answered questions before they were asked.
He put the folder away to reminisce the golf course.
Diana at the railing, coffee in hand, the grey light, the careful architecture of her saying ’don’t read into things’ while standing close enough that her arm was three inches from his.
Why was her leg under the table at the dinner?
He had the answer to that question.
He quickly focused on the date tonight instead, which was the correct thing to think about, and went to his closet to figure out what he was wearing.
---
The next two hours were, by any reasonable asure, a disaster.
Not externally. Externally he was a man standing in his apartnt trying on clothes.
Internally he had sohow turned a simple decision into a multi-variable problem that he was losing.
The first outfit was too formal — he looked like he was going to close a deal, not have dinner.
The second was too casual — fine for a bar, wrong for Eleven on Park, and also Zara would arrive looking like Zara and he would look like a man who had not thought about it.
The third was the charcoal suit from the gala, which he imdiately ruled out because he had been standing in a won’s bathroom in that suit four days ago and it felt like it carried a residual complication he didn’t need at dinner tonight.
He stood in front of his closet in his third discarded outfit and called Sophie.
"Why are you calling ," she said. She didn’t sound annoyed. She sounded amused, which was sohow worse.
"I need outfit advice."
A pause. "For what?"
"A date."
"With who? The famous girl."
"Yes."
"You’re calling to help you get dressed for your date with another woman."
"You’re my lead designer. You have visual instincts."
"Ryan."
"Sophie."
A long exhale. "Fine. Send photos."
He took photos of three combinations and sent them.
The response ca back in the form of a voice note, which was Sophie trying not to laugh while describing why the first two were wrong in terms that were specific enough to be genuinely useful and delivered with enough comntary that he held the phone away from his ear once.
The third she said was good. Dark navy, simple, not too much.
"The shoes matter," she said. "Don’t wear the ones you wore golfing."
"How do you know I went golfing."
"Mike sent the picture you put into you boy’s groupchat.."
"Mike really need to shut the fuck up more."
"But talking is his only supernatural ability." A pause. "The brown leather ones. Not the black."
"Thank you."
"You’re going to buy lunch next week."
"Done."
She hung up.
He put on the navy, found the brown leather shoes, looked in the mirror and decided it was good enough and also that he was done thinking about it.
---
By four o’clock he had confird the reservation, mapped the route, and run out of productive things to do with his afternoon.
He sat on the couch wondering about the penthouse balcony and her telling him he was her first kiss with matter-of-fact honesty that only soone who stopped being embarrassed about it could muster.
Even how she went quiet in private in a way that was completely at odds with the version of her that existed in thirteen-point-two million people’s feeds.
He was looking forward to tonight, which was a straightforward feeling and one he hadn’t had in a while about anything that wasn’t business.
He picked up his phone to check the ti.
There was a ssage.
Unknown number.
He opened it.
*You’re running out of ti.*
He put the phone face-down on the cushion.
He sat there for a mont.
The apartnt was quiet. The afternoon light ca through the window and sat on the floor in a long flat rectangle and didn’t move.
He read the ssage again.
Sa number as before. Sa tone. Two ssages now, both vague enough to an anything and yet uncomfortably specific. It wasn’t spam — spam didn’t use your last na. Not a wrong number either. Soone who had his contact information and a reason to use it, and who had decided that reason was best communicated in eight words at a ti.
He thought about who knew what.
The system was his.
Nobody else had seen it, nobody else knew it existed, and the cashback chanics were invisible from the outside — deposits looked like deposits, no different from any other incoming transfer until you started asking where they ca from, which was exactly what the IRS was doing and which was exactly what the paperwork was designed to address.
The IRS interview was his.
Diana knew about it because he’d needed her to, and her attorney knew because attorneys needed to know things to fix them. That was a sealed circuit.
So whoever this was, they were working from the outside. They could see his na and his number and whatever was visible from the surface — the company formation, maybe. The public-facing stuff. A filing, a registration, sothing that left a footprint in a database sowhere.
Or they were guessing.
He turned that over.
Two texts. No follow-up. No demand, no ask, no specific information that proved they actually knew anything. Just pressure applied in the dark to see if sothing moved.
He set the phone on the table.
That was a thing people did when they didn’t have leverage. When they wanted you to call them, or panic, or make a move that revealed sothing they couldn’t see from where they were standing.
He wasn’t going to do any of those things.
He looked at the ti.
Two hours and forty minutes until he needed to leave.
He got up, went to the bathroom, turned the shower on, and let the afternoon’s accumulation of low-grade anxiety run down the drain with everything else.
There was a date tonight.
The rest of it would be there tomorrow.
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