Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96454 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 482(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96454 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 482(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
I don’t have much of either one, and a big part of that had been my choice in romantic partners.
Anika leans forward, avoiding her half-empty mimosa glass to put a hand on my arm. “We know what happened.”
That’s the trouble. She knows. Harper knows. The server probably knows. Everyone knows. My story is out there all over every tech journal and permeating the Internet like viral video gone wrong. My life dissected and turned into a cautionary tale.
Tech Goddess Brought Down by Dumbass Man Who Can’t Do Math
They’ll put it on my tombstone someday. Except I won’t have one. I’m totally choosing the cremation route, and hopefully someone throws a handful of me in Nick Stafford’s face and he chokes on me.
After all, I damn straight choked on the ashes of the company he single-handedly burned to the ground.
“That’s exactly why I think you need to try again.” Nothing deflects Harper when she gets an idea in her head. That stubborn will serves her well as a woman in the male-dominated industry of construction. “It’s been six months and you’re back home. You’ve done everything you need to concerning the sale of the company, and it’s time to move on with your life.”
She’s right about one thing. “I agree with you. Not about dating, but about moving forward when it comes to work. I’m going to Cecelia Foust’s cocktail party tonight.”
More words that threaten to shake my carefully constructed calm, but this is something I’m going to do.
Anika’s brows rise, and I can see she’s barely managing to avoid rolling those blue eyes of hers. “Cecelia? Really?”
I’d gotten a last-minute invite to the party that would be filled with some of the world’s wealthiest investors. Walking into that party is going to be rough, and it will take a whole lot of bravado I’m not sure I have anymore. After all, I’m the fallen freaking angel of the tech world, but I keep telling myself if Jobs could get fired from Apple and turn around and build Pixar and then march back in and take over Apple again, then I can figure out how to climb the mountain after a fall.
Besides, I owe CeCe. I’m calling her Cecelia like she hasn’t been important to me since I was a teenage girl. The truth is I’m as freaked about seeing CeCe as I am about facing a bunch of investors who know I got my ass handed to me. I’ve been avoiding CeCe, and when I got that invite, I realized she was done with letting me hide away.
“You know why Ivy’s doing it,” Harper says. “The more important thing is she accepted the invite.”
Anika’s eyes widen. “Wow. Are you sure you’re ready for this? Do you have an idea to pitch?”
My two best friends in the world might not understand everything about Tech World, but they know about pitching to investors. There’s not much I haven’t talked over with these two. Even when I lived in San Francisco and they were here in New York, we talked almost every day.
Now that I’m home again, they both offered me a place to stay.
There are days I wish my pride allowed me to take them up on that. Mostly the ones that end in “y.”
“I always have an idea,” I return.
That is not a lie. The problem is I don’t have a big idea. I have a hundred little ones. Tinkering ideas, as I like to call them. Sometimes I look at other people’s code and figure out how to streamline it, to make it work more seamlessly or to simply connect faster. When I started in the business, I was known as a fixer. I was the person who fixed other people’s ideas. Then I had a brilliant idea to build a company that did exactly that. I sold that one to chase after my next big dream—the one that came crashing down.
I couldn’t fix our cash flow problems because I hadn’t known they existed. Not that anyone in the industry believes me. After all, I presented myself as the smartest chick in tech.
Turns out I was a dumb girl who thought her boyfriend wouldn’t screw her over. A lot like the rest of the woman-identifying world.
“Are you sure you’re ready for something like this?” Harper puts down the perfectly made croissant she’s been enjoying. Her dark hair is up in a high ponytail, accentuating the delicate beauty of her face. No guy who meets her thinks she runs a construction company.
She likely could have been a cheerleader or prom queen if she’d fallen in with the right crowd. Unfortunately for her, she’d found us. Anika and I were the nerds of our school. I was big into robotics and coding at the time, and Anika was a card-carrying member of the AV club. She was now working her way up the ladder at a major network.