The Backup Plan

Chapter 5: Three Rounds, Then a Signature

The video came out on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I had stopped pretending I wasn't checking my phone at work.

Old Man Talks Shop was a channel I'd never heard of. A guy in his sixties who ran a flooring company, forty thousand subscribers, most of them other people with stores and trucks and a bookkeeping problem. He spent eleven minutes of his video on LedgerLite, the way you'd talk about a good pair of boots. He said he used to do his books at his kitchen table at eleven at night with a legal pad. He said now he does them in twenty minutes between jobs. He said it cost less than his cable bill.

Eleven minutes. A hundred and seventy thousand views in the first day.

I watched it three times at my desk with the sound off, reading the captions, and the whole time my face did nothing. That part I've gotten good at.

That night the number on the dashboard was three thousand four hundred new signups. In one day. The previous six months combined had been a little over four hundred.

I sat on the balcony with my laptop until two in the morning and watched the number climb like water coming through a wall.

---

The month after that was the strangest month of my life, and most of it happened without anybody in it knowing.

First week: eight thousand new users.

Second week: sixteen thousand.

Third week: the paid conversion rate crossed twelve percent, which meant nothing to anybody except me and three companies whose names I was starting to recognize in my inbox.

I read every message in the user forum. Every one. There were a few hundred a day by then.

A woman who ran a food truck downtown wrote: *finally I don't have to do this on a legal pad at night.*

A man with a hardware store wrote: *my wife used to do the books and now she watches me do them and she has opinions.*

A girl with a bubble tea shop wrote: *a supplier shorted me last month and I would never have caught it without the reconciliation. I love you, whoever made this.*

I read that one about six times.

"You're doing it again," Norah said from the bed.

"Doing what."

"Sitting there with your face lit up like a kid." She rolled over and squinted at me. "You've been doing it all week. What time is it."

"Late."

"It's always late." She pulled the blanket up to her chin. "You type different when it's your own project. I've seen you type at work. You've got a whole different face for that."

I closed the laptop.

"Come to bed," she said, already half gone. "You weirdo."

---

The business development people wanted to meet in person, which meant the parking lot of a Starbucks in Cupertino at nine in the morning and a man in glasses who introduced himself as Kevin from Brightbridge.

He didn't waste time.

"We've looked at your numbers," he said. "Your architecture is good. Retention is very good. The curve is very healthy. There's a real gap in this market for small merchants, and you're the one who's in it."

"Thanks."

"We want to acquire it. That was in the email."

"I read the email."

"But the situation has changed since then." He pushed his glasses up. "Vertex Cloud is talking to you too. Yes?"

"Yes."

"What's their number."

"Three million."

Kevin smiled and wrote something on a napkin and turned it around. Twelve million. *Exclusive.*

I picked up my coffee and drank and my hand was steady.

"Twelve million," I said.

"Exclusive. We don't want a bidding war with a company your size is going to regret getting into."

"I'll think about it."

"Please do. It's a narrow window." He stood and put a card down. "This doesn't stay open forever."

The next day Numera came in at ten million and a long-term engineering partnership. Which meant three companies bidding on something I'd made in a rented apartment after work.

I ate lunch that day in my car in the parking garage at Harlow and pulled up the analytics on my phone and gave myself ten minutes.

Then I started negotiating.

---

The first round, I walked in with my hands in my pockets and let them talk.

The second round, my lawyer was there. Her name was Petra and she'd come recommended by a person I trusted, and she listened to Brightbridge's revised language for forty minutes without saying a word and then said, "No. Say that part again without the adjective."

The third round was in a conference room on Sand Hill with a view of a parking structure and a lemon tree, and the number on the table went from twelve to twenty-two to forty in a way that should have felt like something and didn't, mostly because I was looking at the markup on page eleven.

Forty million dollars. Up front, all cash. Plus a three-year transition consulting agreement that paid me to stay reachable, plus a small ongoing percentage of revenue, which they didn't want to give and Petra made them give.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you the numbers are the part I remember. What I remember is the pen. It was a black ballpoint that had been sitting in a plastic cup in the middle of that conference room for probably three years, and when I picked it up to sign, there was a little smear of dried ink on the barrel, and I thought about a guy coming into this same room three years before me, taking this same pen out of the same cup, and signing something that mattered to him.

Petra's voice was somewhere over my left shoulder. "Initial here. And here."

I did.

---

I signed on a Friday.

When it was done I shook hands around the room, made the friendly noises, and went down to the street and stood there for twenty minutes and smoked one cigarette down to nothing and didn't go back up.

It was November and cold and the light came down early, and the street smelled like rain that hadn't started yet.

I didn't feel it yet. That was the thing. I knew the number. I had it memorized. There was a copy of the thing in the bag on my shoulder and I wasn't going to open it because opening it would not make it any more true than it already was.

I just stood there. My mother called while I was standing there and I watched it ring and picked up.

"Are you okay?" she said.

"Yeah."

"You sound tired. Have you been eating?"

"Some."

"Some," she said, in the voice she uses when she's deciding whether to say the next thing. She said it anyway. "You've been tired for a month. I can hear it on the phone."

"I know."

"Okay," she said. "Whatever it is. I'm not asking."

"Thanks, Mom."

"You don't have to thank me for not asking."

I hung up and put the phone back in my pocket and the cigarette was burning my fingers so I put it out and threw it in the can and went to my car.

---

I didn't want to do it at the apartment. That was the one thing I knew. If I told her in the apartment she would be sitting on the couch or standing at the counter and there'd be the sound of the refrigerator and she'd have the mail in her hand.

So I called and made a reservation.

The restaurant was on the ninth floor of a hotel downtown, with windows on three sides. It was the kind of place with a hostess who says your name, and a menu with no prices until the back page.

I got there early and sat and read the menu without reading it, and then she came in and sat down across from me and picked up her menu and looked at the first page and stopped.

"Ethan."

"Yeah."

"These are forty dollars."

"Uh huh."

"A steak is fifty-five dollars." She looked up at me over the menu. "Do you know what a steak costs at the store."

"I don't."

"Nine dollars. You can buy five steaks and a pan and the pan is non-stick."

"Order the steak."

She stared at me. It was not a friendly stare. It was the stare she gives contractors who quote her two estimates apart on the same job.

"I'm ordering the salad," she said. "And you're ordering the salad."

"Okay."

"And we're splitting the fries. If you order the fries they're fourteen dollars and if we split them you get nine dollars of fries and I get five."

"Okay."

"Okay," she said, and put the menu down, and that was when I took the manila envelope out of my bag and put it on the table between us.

She looked at it.

"What is this."

"Open it."

She opened it. She took out the copy of the executed agreement and folded the first page back and read the cover. She read for a while. She turned to page two. She turned to the page that had the number at the top, where the number is the whole first line because there's nothing else to put there.

Her hand stopped moving.

She looked at the number for a long time.

"Ethan."

"Yeah."

"This says forty." She turned the page back and looked at it like it might be a misprint. "Forty million dollars."

"Yeah."

"US dollars."

"Yeah."

"Ethan."

"Yeah."

She set the paper down on the table, flat, and straightened it, and squared it with the edge of the table, and then she put both hands on top of it like it might get up and walk off.

"The little bookkeeping app," she said.

"LedgerLite."

"The thing you — " She stopped. Started again. "The nights you don't come to bed."

"Yeah."

"The balcony at two in the morning. The thing where your face does that."

"Yeah."

"I sold you on that app," she said. "In our kitchen. Before the wedding. I said you should charge for it."

"You did."

She was quiet. She was looking at the paper and not at me and her mouth was doing something I couldn't read.

Then she lifted her head.

"Two years," she said.

"Two years."

"Two years and you didn't say one word."

"I didn't want to — "

"One word, Ethan."

"It wouldn't have been true yet."

She laughed. It wasn't a happy laugh. She laughed once and put her hand over her mouth and took it off.

"So it's true now."

"It's signed. It's filed. It's — "

"That's not what I mean." She leaned forward. "I mean you decided. At some point you decided not to tell me, and you kept deciding, for two years."

I would like to say I had an answer for that. I didn't have an answer for that.

"It wasn't that I didn't trust you," I said. "It's that — " and that was where I ran out of it, because I could hear how it sounded.

She waited.

"I was afraid it wouldn't work," I said. "And if it didn't, then I'd have told you, and you'd have been — you'd have had to be excited about it, and then watch it not work, and I'd have made you carry a thing that was never going to be worth carrying."

"You didn't want me to watch you fail."

I sat there and did not say anything.

I do that.

She let me. She let the silence sit on the table between us and she didn't fill it up for me, which is one of the things about her.

Then she picked the paper back up and read the number again, and her mouth did the thing it had done before, and this time I could see it was the other kind.

"You know what's funny," she said.

"What."

"Your mom called me last month to ask if I'd noticed you being weird. I told her no."

"My mom."

"Your mom." She was crying now. It wasn't a big cry, she'd have hated that. She had her hand at the corner of her eye like she was checking for rain. "She was worried about you. In her way of worrying, where she asks two questions and then makes you a casserole."

"Mom thing."

"Mom thing." She sniffed. She tried on a smile and it worked. "What I want to know is when I get to be worried about you. Because apparently I'm not ranked. Your mother is ranked."

"She's not — "

"She called me, Ethan. I'm the last one in this house to find out anything."

I reached over and took her hand and she let me. Her hand was shaking the way her hands do, which is not very much.

"Number one," I said.

"What."

"You're number one. My mother is number two. After tonight she's number two."

She pulled her hand back and hit me on the arm, not hard.

"I'm not staying anywhere," she said. "You're going to have to tell me everything. Every single step. Every single email, every single person, every single — "

"Okay."

"From the beginning."

"From the beginning."

The waiter came by. She looked at him and looked at the menu and looked at me.

"I'm getting the steak," she said.

---

She took the paper with her. She put it in her purse and she zipped her purse and she pulled the chair out herself, which is a thing she does, and on the way out she was still going and she didn't stop until the elevator.

"I have questions," she said.

"Okay."

"Who is Petra. Why do you have a lawyer named Petra."

"Her last name is Kang. She came from the Barthelson referral."

"What do you mean, *the Barthelson referral*."

"That's the email list."

"What email list — Ethan."

"Okay," I said. "From the beginning."

She got in the elevator and hit the button, hard, and leaned against the back wall of the car and looked at me the whole way down, and her eyes were still bright, and she was smiling and also she was furious and it was one specific face that I'd never gotten like this before.

"Two years," she said, at the lobby.

"I know."

"I'm going to be mad about this for a while."

"I know."

"You don't know."

"I know it a little."

She got in the car and we drove home and she was quiet for the whole first part of it, and then she started asking questions again and did not stop the rest of the way.

In the car I said, "The number — the deal — it closes end of next month. There's a transition period. I'm not going back to the office after that."

"Good," she said.

"That's it? Good."

"I hate that place," she said, to the windshield. "You know that, right. That's not new. I've hated that place for four years."

I hadn't known that.

I sat there and watched the lights go by and understood one more thing tonight, which is that there was more than one thing I'd been wrong about.

When we got to our building she didn't get out right away. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the paper in her purse, and then she looked out through the windshield, and she said:

"On the count of three, you tell me everything. From the very beginning."

"It's a long story."

"We have all night."

"It's — "

"One," she said.

---

She held my hand the whole way up the stairs.

I don't mean she held my hand like people hold hands. I mean she closed her hand around mine at the bottom of the stairwell and did not let go, on the first landing, on the second, where we both slowed down because it was climbing, on the third, and I felt the bones in her hand press into the bones in mine on each step.

She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the next step.

"You're not tired," I said.

"I'm glad, Ethan."

"Of what."

"That you did a thing without asking permission." She took a step. "Also I'm not glad at all and I'm going to yell at you about this tomorrow. Both of those are true."

"Okay."

"Everything tonight. From the beginning."

"Okay."

"Because if you leave a single thing out — "

"I won't."

She got out her key. We stood on the landing outside our door and she was still holding my hand and she was still crying a little and I had stopped trying to keep count of how many times she had hit me on the arm on the way over, and she turned to face me instead of the door.

"Ethan."

"Yeah."

"You don't get to do this again."

"I know."

"I mean it. Not like a thing I'm saying. It's part of the deal. If you ever have two years of something and you don't tell me — "

"I'll tell you."

She nodded. She fit the key into the lock and turned it and pushed the door open, and she was still holding my hand so I went in with her.

She hung her coat on the hook. She took the paper out of her purse and put it on the kitchen table and set the mail that we'd never picked up beside it and smoothed the corner down flat. She stood at the counter and got a glass of water and drank half of it and put it down.

I sat on the edge of the couch.

"Okay," she said, and came over and sat down next to me, close, close enough that I could smell the outside on her coat. "Start with his name."

"Kevin."

"Kevin what."

"I don't know. I have it in the file."

"Get the file."

I got the laptop and opened it on the coffee table and she leaned against my shoulder and read over my arm while I went through it, and it took, in the end, most of the night. I started with the first email in October, the one-sentence paragraph about a forum post. I told her everything I'd done since then. She interrupted. She made me go slower. She stopped me one time to go get the file that had the three-page terms in it, so she could read them for herself while I talked.

At around two she said, "Go to bed when you want, I'm making tea," and she made tea, and drank it, and read the whole consulting agreement sitting sideways on the couch, and did not go to bed either.

Somewhere in there I said, "It's fine, we don't have to — "

"No," she said. "From the beginning."

I went back to the beginning.

At three in the morning she was still awake, and so was I, and the window was black, and she was leaning against me with tea number two in her hand, and the whole thing was on the table.

Then she turned and looked at me, and said the last thing of the night.

"You know what my dad said to me after you left the house."

"What."

"He said he watched you during dinner and thought, that one's saving up for something." She took a sip of the tea. "For two weeks I thought he meant a house."

---

When we finally went to bed it was almost light. She got in first. I got in after her and lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and could not sleep.

I hadn't told her what the last month had been like. I hadn't told her that in the middle of the negotiation I had looked out of that conference room window and seen nothing and heard nothing and thought about an apartment and a woman and a paper bag on a table, and I had picked up the pen.

That one I kept.

She turned over so we were facing.

"You asleep," she said.

"No."

"Good." She reached out and got my arm and pulled it around herself and settled in, and her voice came from under my chin. "Because tomorrow you're going to call your mother."

"Okay."

"Not for me. For you. She thinks you're sick."

"Yeah."

"Nope. Not yeah. You're going to call her and tell her." She fit her head into the space under my jaw and then said, quieter, "And I'm going to be extremely unpleasant to you at the office tomorrow, and then I'll be fine, and then we're even."

"Even," I said.

"Even." She was quiet for a second. "Ethan."

"Yeah."

"I'm not going to be able to sleep either."

"Okay."

"Because of the thing."

"Yeah."

"Sit up," she said. "Tell me again about the user in the bubble tea shop."