“This and that. I also have a corporate job.” A revelation that confused Nolan even more than the Florida thing, and again, I understood. “I started the company by accident, and it just snowballed.”
“How do you start a company by accident?”
“You remember how we had to leave Blackstone House in a hurry?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, I had to basically rip all the hard drives out of my servers and replace them with dummies, which was a pain in the ass. Obviously, I wanted to avoid that ever happening again, so I looked into building my own data centre. I understood the technical specs, and I had the capital, but the business stuff…” I shook my head. “I’m not good at talking with people, and everyone wanted a damn meeting.”
“We’re talking now,” Nolan pointed out.
“That’s different. Anyhow, Chase ran into an old friend of his from high school, Janus, and Jay gets that side of things. So I offered him shares and a job if he helped me, and now I’m CTO of a web services company.”
In reality, it had actually been slightly more complicated. Chase had seen Jay’s suicide note on social media and talked him down off a literal bridge, and then we’d made an emergency flight to Massachusetts to make sure he got the help he needed. And it turned out the help he needed was for someone to listen as he got drunk and poured his heart out, plus a good health insurance package because he’d just been diagnosed with HIV, confessed he was (a) sick and (b) bi to his parents in a panic, and been ejected from the “family.” I’d always thought I had the worst parents in the world, but Jay’s ran a close second.
Chase swore Jay knew a share from a debenture and that he also sounded credible on the phone, so I’d hired him with an excellent benefits package that included medical coverage. He’d helped me to jump-start my plans by finding a semi-built data centre owned by a company in financial trouble—we’d bought it, tweaked the specs a little, and opened within a year. By then, we were already looking for a second location, and one thing led to another…
Now, his viral load was undetectable, and Astela had grown from one location in Boston to a full-fledged cloud computing powerhouse offering over a hundred services. Jay was a fucking magician. And also a close friend, one of the few men in this world that I trusted.
“What does that mean?”
“Web services? Well, basically we provide digital solutions that enable businesses to operate online and connect with customers through the internet. Website design and development, web hosting, domain registration, e-commerce solutions, maintenance. Plus all the backend infrastructure like cloud storage, APIs, database management, and integration with third-party platforms.”
“I meant the CTO part.”
“Oh. Chief Technical Officer.”
Nolan gave a low whistle. “Sounds impressive.”
“I have a really good team.”
“Of all the things I imagined you doing, working as part of a team wasn’t one of them, especially at some big corporation.”
Yeah, same, but sometimes we surprised ourselves.
“Most of the time, I work remotely, although I do have to go to Oregon next week.”
“That’s where your office is?”
“Headquarters is in Boston. The Oregon trip is to assess a site for a new data centre.”
I always made the final decision on those kinds of things because I was too much of a control freak to let anyone else do it, although Jay wouldn’t be dragging me out to Portland if he wasn’t pretty sure I’d say yes.
“When do you leave?”
“Sunday night.”
“And will you come back?”
I studied Nolan carefully, my chin resting on my hands, but his expression was impassive.
“Do you want me to?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them. I wasn’t prepared for the way my pulse sped up, for the way my heart hammered against my rib cage.
I was terrified he might say no.
But he didn’t say no. Instead, he pushed back his chair and headed for the kitchen.
