“After that?”
He shrugged. “I needed to know if it was actually going somewhere. With the students, I mean. Not me.”
“You had inserted yourself into an experiment of your own making.”
“Did I do wrong?”
“Did … Colin, you are a wonder.” She pulled out her phone and set it on the low table beside her chair. “You mind if I write this up?”
“Why should I mind? Write it up for what?”
“A journal. I’m naming you as coauthor.” She touched the screen. “All right. I’m recording now. From the top. Go.”
An hour and a half later, as he was leaving the room, Celeste called him back. “Young man,” she said, leaning heavy on the words, “it is good to know those students can come to you when their world gets shaken.”
CHAPTER28
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were given over to university classes and studies. Colin did away with the previous term’s haphazard manner. He was there to learn, the opportunity was a gift, he needed to be responsible. … All the adult arguments finally began to make sense. Colin found himself often thinking of Lenny on those days. Especially when he took time to do almost nothing. Sitting under a tree in one of the university quads, wandering through the library stacks, lingering in a student café, listening to the talk swirl about him, pretending to be busy working a problem. All the things Lenny had yearned for. Colin often lifted his cup to the memory of his departed friend.
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays started with a long, hard swim, then were given over to the growing fund. He continued to make new investments, closing off positions whenever his analysis reached the critical juncture.
Arnold and Sandrine had invested some of their retirement savings. Through them, the college endowment inserted what they called a modest amount. All of Roland’s partnersand most of the firm’s support staff were involved. Ditto for the firm where Ethan worked. A number of Mira’s and Lucas’s friends at school were putting in every dime they could scrape together. Counting on him.
Just after Thanksgiving, Colin’s personal take passed the million-dollar mark.
He didn’t tell anyone. He assumed Roland and Aaron both knew, though neither said a word. After that summer’s five thousand–dollar cash injection, Colin had taken nothing more. He spent money on clothes, Uber, the occasional meal, the coffee shops, cinema. Otherwise, the numbers alongside his name meant very little. Symbols on a screen. For Colin, the most important reward came from having gotten this concept very right. The pressure was still there, the tension highest just before he called Lucretia and gave new instructions. But alongside the constant sense of walking the financial tightrope, Colin also felt a growing calm. He knew he was good at this.
Then the second week in December, everything changed.
CHAPTER29
The opportunity sprang out of nowhere, and at the ideal moment. The previous week they had closed two of their three open positions. The cash just sat there in the fund’s accounts, a frightening sum if he allowed himself to think of it as anything more than symbols. Elements required to put the next step into motion. TheJournalspoke of the December doldrums, almost as if the world could be forgiven for taking a month off.
Then rumors appeared on the three professional chat rooms he had come to consider his best conduits for initial alerts. For the first time ever, all three registered the news on the exact same night. An LA-based music company had built itself into a regional powerhouse, comprising four semiautonomous divisions: a distribution company, a top-of-the-line recording studio, a concert organizer, and a quasi-independent group handling backlists and music rights. But five dismal quarters in a row had wreaked havoc with their cash reserves. The stock had tanked, and their majorinvestors were pushing for an executive-level overhaul. Before it was too late.
The news sources all reported the same thing: Two different global powers were considering an outright purchase. Interest in acquiring the group was driven by the strength of their backlist and good reports about two new signings.
Colin gave it a day. The calculations almost completed themselves. The upside was stratospheric. He searched the major feeds and discovered a paragraph in the business section of theLA Times’s online business news. He feared he had left it too late.
There was nothing else on the horizon. Not even a hint of motion anywhere, at least until the new year.
Colin called Lucretia and committed all the cash they had on hand. Seventy-seven percent of the fund’s holdings.
Christmas came and went in a series of events and friends and families and celebrations. For the first time in his life, Colin found himself fielding invitations. Arnold and Sandrine, Celeste and her extended family, Mira and Alexi and Ethan, Roland and Regina. He ate to the point of feeling genuine pain when he lay down at night. On three separate occasions he drove with friends through Historic Wilmington and walked the upscale streets, gawking at the lights and the window displays and the people. He tasted spiked eggnog and whiskey sours for the first time, and loathed them both. It was a wondrous, magical period. He was sorry to see it end, just fade away on the first of January, descending into silence and a sort of bemused contentment on many faces.
Through it all, he kept having these niggling doubts. Tight whispers that reminded him of the unseen fears he had carried throughout his early years. The shadows that loomed behind unopened doors, the silent threat his father broughtinto the house on bad days. The uncertainty, the absence of control. All of it came and went in great swirling eddies that sometimes attacked with such force the entire world came to a screeching halt. And then it was gone again. Vanished. The world restarted, the laughter and happy chatter resumed, he was once again surrounded by people who cared.
For the first time in months, Colin took to running his calculations every night, and sometimes again the next morning. Inputting whatever new data he could find, which wasn’t much. Even during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the unease would not let up. He assumed it came from the size of this investment. After all, this was the largest position his fund had ever taken.
Nine days into the new year, the builders were gone and the cleaners finished. Arnold and Sandrine led him through the downstairs apartment. Colin had never been farther than the front office, which was now transformed. The heavy dark furniture, the uncomfortable sofa, the yellowed wallpaper, gone. In its place was a bright and airy room with a simple pale wash on the walls and ceilings, and matching beige carpet and sash drapes. Even the two windows had been replaced. He had never noticed the view until that moment. Always before his focus had been exclusively on the woman seated behind the massive oak desk. Which was gone as well, replaced by an IKEA-designed work table of pale wood with bright blue metal legs. The office also served duty as his parlor, and now contained bookshelves and new sofa and comfy chair and flat-screen TV. The kitchenette had all new appliances, the small dining table stationed against the opposite wall. And downstairs a bedroom, as bright and cheerful as a windowless room could possibly be. Single bed of pale wood, matching dresser and cupboard, new bathroom. Colin walked from room to room in a daze.
That night Colin filled his plate with the others, then carried his dinner into the apartment and ate alone. He doubtedhe would do this very much, unless work demanded it. The time together in the dining hall was too important. But tonight was special. The silence, the space, the newness and clean lines, the solitude … He stopped several times just to breathe in the pleasure.
At precisely one-fifteen that morning, he awoke from a nightmare he could not remember. The clock on the bedside table seemed not to show the time, but rather to shout in pale blue luminosity that he had left it all too late.
CHAPTER30
Colin raced upstairs, flung open his laptop, and went back to the very first notes he had made about the investment. Perhaps it was the new apartment, the shift from one existence to another. Whatever the reason, the instant he started reviewing his initial calculations, he saw.