Chapter 1: Basement Light (3)

"What are you building?"

He never answered it the same way twice, and that was the trick of it. He didn't have a pitch memorized. He had a world in his head, and he was inviting her in.

"Right now, a better way to price risk. After that—" he'd wave at the stack of blueprints, the spreadsheets, the napkin math—"a system that doesn't make the poor pay for the rich's mistakes. Infrastructure, Lila. The rails underneath everything. They've been owned by the same families for a hundred years. Nobody thinks to ask why."

"And you're going to ask why."

"I'm going to be the answer. Give me five years, and I'll be the reason a kid in a basement can build something without asking anyone's permission."

She watched him talk with his hands, fire in his eyes, and she understood that she was watching somebody who would either change the world or burn it down trying. She had no idea, then, how close to both he would get.

"Five years," she said. "I'll hold you to that."

"Deal."

They shook on it, solemnly, over instant coffee, and then he ruined it by pulling her across the table and kissing her, which was not part of the agreement but had never once been objected to.

⁂

Most nights, though, the fraud was the other direction. Kane would be at the folding table at three in the morning, redrafting a pitch deck for the eighth time, and Lila would slide in across from him with two cups of terrible instant coffee and say, "Read me the bad slide."

"There are no bad slides," he'd say, every time, mechanically.

"There are." She'd point. "That one. You buried the actual number under a joke about your past life."

"Because the actual number is embarrassing."

"Kane. You've been rejected seventeen times. There's no number embarrassing enough to matter anymore. Put the number on the slide. Let them choke on it."

He'd look at her. That was the look. The one she'd moved into a basement for. Fire in his eyes, quiet, aimed entirely at her.

"Someday," he said once, "you're going to be running a company, and I'm going to be sitting in the front row of some conference watching you destroy a panel of old men, and I'm going to tell everyone that you taught me how to put the number on the slide."

"Flattery," she said. "In writing, that's called flattery."

"I'm serious, Lil."

"I know. Drink your coffee."

Kane drank his coffee, and watched her over the rim, and did not say the thing he was thinking. The thing was this: in every room they'd ever walked into together, the fire everyone assumed was his was actually hers. She was the one who returned fire. She was the one who'd torn up a Wall Street offer to sit in a basement with a boy who owed forty-seven grand. She was the one who believed, with an absolutism that terrified him, that he was going to make it.

Nobody had ever believed in Kane Thorne like that. Not his father, who was somewhere in Europe and did not call. Not the seventeen venture funds, who kept their rejection emails short and pleasant. Only her. Always her.

He thought, then, that the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be to fail in front of her.

He was wrong. The worst thing would be to succeed without her, and to know, in the quiet rooms of his success, that she was somewhere else now, succeeding without him. But he wouldn't learn that until it was too late to unlearn.

⁂

On the 217th day of his startup—the night of the seventeenth rejection—New York had a blackout.

The whole block went dark in a single breath. Streetlights, bodega signs, the hum of every appliance, gone. Only the emergency light stayed on, pale and buzzing, throwing one weak column of yellow across the room.

Lila and Kane were wedged between blueprints and mac-and-cheese boxes when the lights died, and in the sudden dark he said, "Well. That's one way to get me to stop staring at the deck."

"Should we do something about the lack of electricity?"

"I was thinking the same thing."

He found her face in the dark—cupped it in both hands, carefully, like she was something fragile and priceless that the blackout might swallow—and kissed her.

It was December. The basement was cold as a meat locker. His mouth was not.

His hands were not either. His palms ran hot against her cheeks, hot as radiators, and even then—especially then—she noticed. Kane Thorne never got sick. Kane Thorne walked through a Brooklyn January in a thin hoodie and came home with his hands burning. She filed it away, the way you file away anything about the person you love that doesn't quite add up, and promised herself she'd figure it out someday.

When I make it, he murmured against her forehead, voice hoarse and burning, you'll never eat mac and cheese again.

"Then hurry," she said, breathless, "because I'm starving."

The emergency light flickered. He laughed, low and warm, and pulled her closer, kissing from the corner of her mouth down along her jaw, hot breath sinking into the hollow of her neck. She arched into him, fingers in his hair, and for one minute the basement was the only place in the world that mattered—