Not in love

4

NOT ENEMIES

RUE

There are two main reasons I called this meeting,” Florence

Kline said, and if she was in the grip of even a tenth of the panic her employees seemed to be experiencing, no one would have been able to guess.

Then again, Florence was like that. Steel nerved. Yes-can-do. Indomitable. A rising tide. I’d never seen her doubt herself, and no private equity firm could force her to start.

“The first is to reassure all of you that your jobs are safe.”

Murmurs of relief scrambled around the room like ants in sugar, but many remained unconvinced.

“There are no plans of reshuffling. I am still the CEO of this company, the board remains unchanged, and so does your employment situation. If you’re not pocketing printer ink, you can expect your professional life to remain constant.”

That had most people laughing. And it was, in a nutshell, the reason Florence Kline had built a successful company in just a few years. Being the inventor of a promising biofuel made her an outstanding scientist, but Florence was more than that. Florence was a leader.

As well as one of my closest friends. Which meant that I knew her tells well enough to doubt most of the words currently flowing out of her mouth.

“Second: the representatives from Harkness, our new lender, are not enemies. Harkness has a long history of uplifting tech and healthcare startups, and that’s why they’re here. Their objective is, of course, to conduct due diligence and make sure that their financial interests are met, but our work—your work—has always been impeccable. They’ll be setting up meetings with some of you, and you should make them your priority. And I want to make sure that you recognize them if you see them around: Dr. Minami Oka, Dr. Sullivan Jensen, Mr. Eli Killgore, and Mr. Conor . . .”

“Rue?” Tisha asked in a low whisper.

I didn’t reply, but she continued anyway.

“That driver’s license you sent last night?”

I nodded. The floor beneath my feet was gone, dropped to the core of the earth. I was sliding right through it, and nothing was going to break my fall.

“The pic of that guy . . . his face.”

I nodded again. It was, undeniably, a memorable face. Striking. Attractive, I’d told him, meaning it. Short, wavy—no, curly hair, just this side of too wild. Square jaw. Strong, aquiline nose that sat somewhere between the Roman and Greek civilizations, deep in the Adriatic. Long vowels and the occasional dropped consonant.

“And his name. Killgore.”

I’d teased him about that, and it had felt like a first. Joking around with people required a degree of ease that usually took me decades to reach, but with Eli it had been simple, for no reason that I could discern.

He was just some ordinary man, and last night he’d exuded the same energy he did now: nice guy, radically unafraid, fundamentally comfortable with himself and others. He’d kept it well into our car ride, that unsettling calm. Meanwhile, I’d been barely able to tear my eyes from him, my hands shaking as I stepped into the circle of his warm, woodsy scent to write my number on his palm.

“That man on the stage. It’s him, right?”

I nodded one last time, unable to speak.

“Okay. Yeah. Wow.” Tisha made to massage her eyes, then remembered her elaborate makeup. “That’s quite a . . . I believe the scientific word for it is ‘coinkydink.’”

Is it? Could it be? Acid rose in my throat, because I wasn’t sure coincidences of this magnitude existed. Had Eli known who I was? Where I worked? I stared, hoping an answer would appear on his face. He was wearing glasses today. Dark rimmed. The most ridiculous of Clark Kent’s disguises.

“I can’t believe they sent four lender representatives,” Jay said, breaking through the fog in my brain.

I turned to him, dazed. “Is that weird?”

“They don’t even own us yet, do they? It seems like a lot of resources to expend on a company they haven’t even acquired, but”—he shrugged—“what do I know? I’m just a humble country lab technician.”

“You were born in Lisbon and have a master’s degree from NYU,” Tisha pointed out. “Maybe they just like to travel together, entourage-style. Share an omelet chef and a CVS card.”

“Are the four . . . are they all employed by the private equity?” I asked.

“I just looked up the Harkness website—they are the founding partners. I understand that they want to send someone to check on whether the covenants are being met—”

“The what now?” Tisha sounded done with this fucking day. I could vigorously relate.

“You know, those promises you make when you sign a contract? They give us the money; in exchange we deliver a partridge in a pear tree? Why are the partners here, though? Why not send a VP? Is Kline that big a deal for them? It just sounds a bit sus.”

Tisha and I exchanged a long, heavy glance.

“We need to talk to Florence,” I whispered. “In private.”

“Do you still have the keys to her office? From her birthday, when we stuffed it with those ‘you’re old as shit’ balloons?”

I stood. “I do.”

“Great. Jay, see you later.”

“If I don’t get fired, and lose my visa, and end up deported out of the country.”

“Yeah.” Tisha waved him goodbye. “Try not to walk into the sea, okay?”

We left the room just as Florence invited everyone to keep calm and return to their workplaces.

It had all started with fermentation. Which, admittedly, was a less-than-enthralling topic—even for someone like me, with a relentless passion for chemical engineering and an unwieldy interest in the production of ethanol. Still, a couple of boring chemical reactions had changed the trajectory of food microbiology, and Florence Kline was the person who got credit for that.

Less than a decade earlier, Florence had been a professor at UT Austin with a really, really good idea for how to perfect a process that could cheaply convert food waste into biofuels on a mass scale. Because she was a faculty member, UT’s labs had been at her disposal, but Florence had known that any sort of discovery made on campus grounds, using campus resources, would end in the university owning the resulting patent. And Florence was not about that.

So she’d rented lab space at a nearby facility. She’d done her own work. She’d filed her own patent, and founded her own company. Others had trickled in later: private grants, angel investors, venture capitalists, a handful, then dozens, then hundreds of employees. The company had expanded, perfected Florence’s revolutionary tech, and brought it to market.

Then, about four years ago, I’d jumped on board.

Florence and I both lived in Austin at the time, but by a fluke of fate we first met in Chicago, at the a

Alone.

The academic networking game required a healthy number of interpersonal graces, of which I had none. In fact, by the time I reached grad school, I’d been set in my ways for over a decade—ways that entailed concealing my shyness, self-consciousness, and general inability to offer rewarding social interactions to another human being, mostly behind a standoffish facade. But people were hard—to read, to understand, to please. At some point in my youth, without quite meaning to do so, I’d gone from being incapable of carrying out a conversation to coming across as though I did not want to be approached for conversation, not ever, not by anyone and not under any circumstances. I still remembered the day in middle school when the realization dawned on me: If people perceived me as aloof and detached, then they would want to keep their distance. And if they kept their distance, then they wouldn’t notice how nervous and blundering and inadequate I was.

A net win, in my humble opinion. A form of masking, in my therapist’s professional one. She thought I was hiding my real self and squashing down my feelings like jumbo marshmallows, but it had been so damn long, I wasn’t so sure there was anything to hide inside me. The disco

It did, however, have some downsides. For instance, people weren’t exactly lining up to hang out with me, which in Chicago had made for a fairly solitary, tedious conference. It didn’t help that I’d firmly refused to change my presentation title (“A Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Investigation of the Effect of Three Polysaccharide-Based Coatings on the Minimization of Postharvest Loss of Horticultural Crops”) to my adviser’s preferred “Three Microbes in a Trench Coat: Using Polysaccharides to Keep Your Produce Fresher, Longer,” or my coauthor’s suggestion, “Take a Coat, It’ll Last Longer,” or Tisha’s appalling “If You Liked It, Then You Should Have Put a Coat on It.”

I knew that science communication was an important job, crucial to building public trust and informing a wide array of policies, but it wasn’t my job. I had no talent for enticing people to care about my work: either they saw its value, or they were wrong.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority appeared to be wrong. I’d been dozing off from boredom and considering ducking out early when a woman stopped by my poster. She was much shorter, and yet imposing. Because of her assertive air, or maybe just the sheer mass of her red curls.

“Tell me more about this microbial coating,” she said. Her voice was deep, older than her looks. She asked many pertinent questions, was impressed at all the right parts, and once I was done with my spiel she said, “This is a brilliant study.”

I already knew that, so I wasn’t particularly flattered, but I thanked her anyway.

“You’re welcome. My name is—”

“Florence Kline.”

Florence smiled. “Right. I keep forgetting that we’re wearing name tags, and . . .” She looked down at herself, where there was no lanyard. No tag. No name. Then back up to me. “How did you know?”

“I’ve read up on you. Well, on your patent saga.”

“My patent saga.”

I had no idea whether Florence’s case had been legitimately high profile or just felt so because of the circles in which I moved, but the facts were simple: Despite the incontrovertible proof that she had independently developed the biofuel tech, UT still claimed ownership of her (very lucrative) patent. Lawyers had gotten involved, which would have heavily tilted the scale in favor of the university, but Florence had been able to turn things around by bringing the matter to the media.