They taped the article at Lily height. That night after Lily was asleep with the hall light on, Marcus and Olivia sat on his small couch in his small apartment a world away from the glass tower and Olivia said the thing she'd been carrying all week. I need to tell you something and I need you to not do the running thing. Marcus tensed on instinct. Okay, the board's going to force a vote.
Olivia said, "Gerald's been making calls after the gala, after the interview, after I told a room full of shareholders I'd buy out anyone who had a problem with you. They think I've lost my judgment. There's a faction that wants to remove me as CEO of my own company, the company I built." Her voice was steady, but her hands weren't. The votes in three weeks, and I could lose Marcus. For the first time since I built this thing, I could actually lose it.
Marcus was very quiet and Olivia braced because this was it. This was the moment. The moment he learned that loving her might cost her the company that being with him might be the thing that took away everything she'd built. That Daniel's whole poisonous premise. You're bad for her.
You make her weak. A smart woman wouldn't. Might turn out to be true after all. She braced for him to pull away. To decide that the noblest thing the Marcus thing was to remove himself so she could keep her company.
Instead, Marcus took her hand. Then we fight that too, he said simply in the light together, same as everything else. He looked at her steady as a loadbearing wall. You spent 3 years fighting alone and I spent 3 years hiding alone and we were both real good at alone. I think we're done with alone now.
So, no, you're not losing your company. Not while I'm standing here. What do you need me to do? And Olivia Carter, who had walked into a maintenance man's apartment, braced for him to leave, put her face in her hands and cried, not from fear this time, but from the sheer unfamiliar relief of not being alone in the fight, while a man who used to be invisible held her together on a secondhand couch under a halllight. He kept on for his daughter 3 weeks away from the vote.
That would decide everything. The three weeks before the vote were the longest of Olivia Carter's life, and she spent them doing something she had never once done in her career. She asked for help. It started small. She sat Marcus down at his own kitchen table with a legal pad and told him everything the ownership structure, the board seats, who owed what to whom, which director had a daughter applying to colleges and needed the stock to stay high.
Which one had never forgiven her for a decision three years ago, which one Gerald had in his pocket, and which one only looked like he did? Marcus listened the way he listened to a failing machine. Quiet, patient, turning it over. You keep talking about the votes you've already lost, he said, finally tapping the legal pad. Gerald's block.
The ones who think you've gone soft. You keep counting them over and over like counting will change the number. Because they're the problem, Marcus. No. Marcus shook his head slowly.
A man doesn't fix a machine by staring at the part that's broken. He looks at the parts that still work and figures out how to run the whole thing on those. He turned the pad around. You've got 11 board seats. Gerald's got four locked up solid.
You've got four locked up solid. That leaves three in the middle. You've been so busy being furious at the four you can't have that you haven't said one word all night about the three you might. Olivia stared at the pad. Then she stared at Marcus.
How do you? She started. Because I've spent 20 years fixing things everybody else gave up on. Marcus said you don't win by beating the broken parts. You win by winning the middle.
Who are your three? And that was the moment Olivia Carter understood that the man she loved wasn't just good with a wrench. He'd been solving the exact same problem his whole life. How do you keep a complicated thing running when half of it wants to quit? And a boardroom was just a machine with worse manners.
Her three were a retired judge named Eleanor Voss, no relation to Gerald, despite the shared name of fact Gerald hated. A soft-spoken venture capitalist named Tom Reyes, who'd been on the board since the beginning and had actually known her father, and a younger director named Priscilla Chen, who'd been brought on for optics two years back and had spent the whole time being talked over in meetings. Start with the one who gets talked over, Marcus said. Chen, nobody's ever asked her what she thinks. You'd be the first.
She's an ally of Gerald's. She's on Gerald's list, Marcus corrected. That's not the same as an ally. You said it yourself. You spent three years letting this company treat me like furniture and you were on that company's side.
Being on somebody's side and being seen by them are two different things. I'd bet money that girl knows the difference better than anybody in that room. He shrugged. Ask her to coffee, not to lobby her. Just ask her what she thinks the company's doing wrong.
Then actually listen. You'd be amazed what people do for you after somebody finally listens. Olivia looked at him for a long moment. You just described exactly what I did to you, she said quietly. 3 years ago coming down to the concrete room asking about your daughter listening.
Yeah. Marcus said, "I noticed that too. It worked pretty good on me. She had coffee with Priscilla Chen the next day. She did not lobby her.
She asked her what the company was doing wrong. And then she sat back and listened for 90 minutes while a woman who'd been talked over for 2 years finally got to say everything she'd been carrying. And by the end of it, Olivia had six pages of notes and something better than a vote. She had an ally who'd chosen her, not been bought. But that was one.
She needed all three. And the second one nearly broke her. Tom Reyes. Her father's old friend invited her to his home, and Olivia went hopeful because if anyone would stand with her, it was the man who'd shaken her father's hand across a diner table 30 years ago when the whole company was a sketch on a napkin. She was wrong.
I loved your father, Tom said in his study, not meeting her eyes. Which is why this is hard. Olivia, he built something and put it in your hands and the whole city's watching you set it on fire over a over a personal matter. The interview, the scene at the gala, buying out shareholders who disagree with you. That's not leadership.
That's a woman having a breakdown in public. And your father would have said the same, and you know it. The words, "Your father would have said the same," hit exactly where Daniels had hit at the gala. And for a second, Olivia was back on that ballroom floor splintering. But she wasn't alone on the ballroom floor anymore.