Gabe was in his office, looking over the Bizzvara presentation on his computer, when Abby Freeman knocked on the door and let herself in. If he were Don Draper he would have had a secretary to stop her. Why wasn’t he Don Draper? Gabe raised his eyes and then lowered them back down, being careful to make himself look busy. Since the drink at the wine bar he’d felt exceedingly uncomfortable around Abby Freeman. She looked young (she was) and harmless (she wasn’t). She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if he could permit himself an idiom.
“Hello!” said Abby. “I just came by with a couple of questions. I hope that’s okay.”
“Shoot,” said Gabe. Shit, he thought.
“I was talking to someone, I forget who it was, and they mentioned that you don’t have an MBA.” She stood in front of his desk and swayed a tiny bit in the heels she was wearing.
So they were doing this. Here. Now. This was it. He met her gaze. “I don’t.”
“That’s unusual, in this industry. Highly unusual. Wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s right.” Highly unusual seemed like a strange phrase for a girl Abby’s age to be using. A young lady.
Abby picked up a family photograph Gabe kept on his desk in a plain silver frame. The photograph showed the Hawthorne females on the beach in Rhode Island during a family trip two summers ago. No, it must have been longer ago than that; Cecily’s front teeth were missing. Three years ago? Nora had sunglasses pushed up on top of her head. She was holding Maya, who looked a little too big to be held and slightly embarrassed about it. Cecily was wearing a bright green bikini and her collarbones and ribs were sticking out. Everyone was suntanned and happy. Gabe had taken the photo. He remembered how hard it had been to get everyone to look at the camera at the same time; finally he’d given up. Angela was looking off to the side just a little bit, hair caught by a summer breeze. As if (this occurred to him only now) she were looking toward the future. His heart constricted a little bit at that thought. “Beautiful family,” said Abby.
“Thank you.” Put down my family.
“I really enjoyed meeting Angela, that time she came by. I see a lot of myself in her.”
No you don’t, you witchy woman. Bite your tongue. Abby put the photo back incorrectly, and Gabe angled it toward himself, the way it had been. “I mean, really almost unheard of, not to have the MBA. Am I right?”
Gabe sighed. “These days, certainly. But keep in mind, when I started Elpis was tiny. Three people in a run-down office in Outer Sunset. We were scrappy. They weren’t as worried about degrees then as they were about gumption. People skills. Excellent communication. Experience. All of which I had.” Gabe took a second to remember those days, the tech boom new, the city bright and promising. The bars full of paper millionaires. Everybody was smiling, all the time. They all thought it would last forever. “There were the founders, and then they hired me. Four of us, then that doubled, then that doubled, and so on.” He paused and turned from Abby to look out the window, over at the little bit of the Transamerica that he could see, though he was too close, of course, to see the top. He’d lived here so long that he remembered when the twenty-seventh floor was still an observation deck. They’d taken Angela up there when she was little.
“And you never went back for your MBA?”
Jesus H. Christ. Maybe you should be interning at a law firm. She could give Nora’s sister, Marianne, a run for her money.
“I thought about it. I wanted to. But then my oldest daughter was born, and I couldn’t go full-time. I needed the job.”
“Nights, though? Weekends?”
Keep it cool, Gabe. He sort of felt like he was in an episode of The Good Wife, being questioned like this. He lifted his hands in a what-do-you-want-me-to-do gesture. “Didn’t work out. Wasn’t really necessary, at the time. Now, of course, you’d never make partner without it. You’d never get hired without it. But it was different then. I learned on the job.”
“Mint?”
“What?”
“I mean, can I have a mint?” Abby nodded toward the bowl of Wint O Green Life Savers on Gabe’s desk, next to the picture.
No. Please leave my office and let me look at the Bizzvara presentation on my own, and please take your uncomfortable line of questioning with you.
“Of course. Absolutely. Help yourself.” If she had been his daughter, he would have instructed her to say, “May I have a mint.”
Abby took a mint and unwrapped it quickly, then stuck it in her mouth. The mint made a cracking sound when she bit down on it. Man oh man, thought Gabe, if this is how you always eat hard candy, Abby Freeman, you are going to have some real problems with your molars by the time you’re my age. He felt a spasm of satisfaction at that thought. Of course, Elpis had a good dental plan. They were about to pay for Cecily’s braces. Nora had pristine teeth; she was a nut about flossing, never needed anything but her regular six-month checkups. Maya was still losing teeth. Gabe loved the lisp that little kids got when they were missing a front tooth. He looked at his laptop and tapped a few keys, although the document was locked. He was just reviewing it, giving it the final once-over. Actually the team had done an outstanding job on this presentation. Bizzvara was going to eat it up.
“Is that the Bizzvara presentation?”
Gabe nodded.
“How’d it come out?”
“Great,” he said, “really great. You all did a fantastic job on it. The analysts told me you had some good insights.”
Abby looked pleased. She took another mint and sat down in the chair across from Gabe’s desk.
“I’d like to be one of the key presenters.”
Gabe laughed out loud at that, and Abby blinked at him. “With all due respect, Abby, you’re an intern. We don’t let interns present to new clients. Sometimes—sometimes—we let them sit in the room. But that’s it. And even that, not very often.”
“I’d like you to make an exception.”
“I don’t think I can make an exception.”
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I think you can. Because there’s something I know about you that I’m guessing you don’t want getting out around the office.”
Was it Gabe’s imagination, or were the walls closing in on him?
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”
“I know your secret.”
The rush of blood to Gabe’s head was so sudden and so loud that it almost made him dizzy. A mortified little voice in his head whispered, Here we go. Dully, he said, “Secret?”
“You see, there’s a little habit I have, a little Google habit. I Google everything.”
Gabe wanted to wipe the floor with Abbie’s smug expression, but the best he could manage was to say, “Everybody Googles everything.”
“I guess I should say I Google everyone, when I land in a new place. Like here, at Elpis. I Googled all of the partners, just to make sure I had all the information.” She smiled. “Did you know Doug Maverick has done three Ironman triathlons?”
Gabe did know that; he’d known Doug Maverick forever.
“And did you know that Stu’s son plays Division I lacrosse at Dartmouth?”
Yes, Gabe knew that too.
“And it was weird, because I didn’t find what I was looking for about you—”
“Abby,” he said firmly. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re talking about. And if you don’t mind, I really need to get back—” Admit nothing.
Joe Stone from HR walked by the office and waved enthusiastically, like a child riding on a carousal might wave to his parents standing outside the gate and snapping pictures. Gabe noticed that his own hand lifted and waved back at Joe; he could feel that his own lips smiled. He was pantomiming the movements of a man whose world was not about to come crashing down. He cleared his throat again. Think of her as cattle, Gabe. Make her do what you want, even if she wants to do the opposite. Prod her, Gabe. But he was mute.
“Want to know how I know? After my Googling proved to be, well, disappointing, in your case, I did something nobody in this company ever bothered to do. I called the registrar’s office. At Harvard.”
A voice that sounded a little bit like Gabe’s spoke. “I’m offended, Abby, that you would insinuate something like this. Offended and, well, frankly, disappointed. Also, I don’t believe that any person can just call up and check someone’s résumé. And even if you could—”
Abby took three mints this time. “You’d be surprised, what you can find out, if you have a relative who works in the registrar’s office. Like my aunt does. I think you’d be really surprised.” She smiled again. “The records at Harvard go back, gosh, decades and decades and decades. Electronic, now, of course, but before that, microfilm.” She folded her hands like a little girl at church. “And would you believe that there was a Gabriel Hawthorne. But he graduated in 1938.”
Thank goodness Gabe wasn’t blushing; he’d be able to feel it if he were. Blushing was such a dead giveaway. No, he knew that if he looked in the mirror he’d be drained of color, white as a sheet, a ghost, a freshly painted wall. One of Gabe’s knees was knocking against the other. Admit nothing.
“So you never peed on the John Harvard statue. You never lived in Adams. You never did the Primal Scream, except maybe when you were born. Not only did you never graduate, you were never enrolled. You never matriculated. My guess is that you never even applied, but of course I don’t know that for sure. They don’t keep records of every applicant. Can you imagine if they did?” She looked him straight in the eyes and said, “So many people want to go to Harvard. So many people.”
“Listen,” said Gabe. Abby looked at him expectantly. “It’s not what you think.” He stopped there because the truth was that it was exactly what she thought.
“Someday, when we have a little more time, I’d love to hear the story, about how you got away with it. No hurry, of course.”
“Abby—”
“I’m not going to do anything about it today, or anything. But there are a couple of things I’d like.”
Somehow, he got his voice to work. He sounded almost normal, casually nonchalant. “Okay, Abby. Out of sheer curiosity, what would you want? If what you’re saying has any basis in fact. Which I’m not saying it does.”
“I want to sit in on the Bizzvara presentation, for one.”
Deep breath. “Fine, okay, done. But you can’t present.”
He thought of Nora, of his daughters. He thought of his brother Michael, the only person who’d called him on it. Who’d been disgusted by it. A coward move, Gabe.
“I want to present Bizzvara.”
What an asshole move, Michael had said. He didn’t care about Lauren anymore at that point. He’d forgiven that, but not this.
“You know you can’t do that.”
“But I want to.” She folded her hands and tapped her index fingers together. It was the gesture of a much older person; he wondered where she’d picked it up. “I want it on my résumé, that I presented to a major client. And I would never, ah, lie on my résumé.”
Deeper breath. Deeper, now. Steady. “You can present a little bit. Just the beginning. I’ll let Dustin know. You can do the intro. But then you have to hand it over to the manager. You have to. Anything more than that would look—well, it would look unprofessional.”
“Got it,” she said. “And I want”—she paused to unwrap yet another mint—“I want a job.”
“Pardon me?”
“When the internship ends. Full-time, with benefits. Analyst position, associate track. I want to be working here when I apply to business school.”
Gabe thought of a bar in Noe Valley, a beautiful girl with skin that glowed from the inside out. Hey, I’m Nora. Nice to meet you. I just moved here. Wyoming? What’s it like living on a ranch?
“Abby. You know I can’t promise that.”
“If you can, your secret is safe with me.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re a partner.”
“Not a senior partner. They make decisions like this, the founders. I don’t have the power to…”
“You’re a smart guy. I mean, not Ivy League smart or anything.” Abby plucked five mints from the bowl and held them in her hand, considering them. Then she closed her fist over them. “But smart enough. You have some time. My internship goes through December. You’ll figure it out.”