I didn’t pick it back up.
I didn’t go back to the post.
And I didn’t think about him any longer than I had to.
Whatever that was…
It stayed where it started.
At that table.
And I left it there on purpose.
V Saint
“All this attention… and none of it meant anything.”
Ihad been many things before I became who I am today.
Some of them knew. Most of it, they didn’t.
They saw the end result. The interviews. The buildings. The numbers tied to my name. They watched it from the outside and made it make sense, however they wanted.
They didn’t see what came before that.
They didn’t see me sitting in rooms I wasn’t getting paid to be in, listening, learning contracts before I ever had one in my name. My father made that clear early. If I was going to do this, I needed to understand it first, without expecting anything back.
They didn’t see me balancing everything at once.
School in the daytime. Drove an Arrowhead water truck in the evening. Late night, I was in the streets making money. I learned how to move in different spaces without letting one mess up the other.
That’s why none of this ever felt new to me.
I built it.
The degrees came after. Real estate development. Finance. I didn’t like asking the same question twice. If I touched it, I understood it.
By the time I stepped into my father’s company for real as CEO when he got sick, I wasn’t learning anymore.
I was already sharp.
That part has never been my issue. It was women.
Now I had a line of women wrapped around my building because I made a joke on Alana’s podcast, and my social media influencer and publicist sister made it a thing.
I sat at the head of my conference table, eating eggs, grits, bacon, and toast, watching Vanessa move around the office like she had just launched something major.
She always been like that.
Extra when she was excited.
“You see this?” she pointed toward the glass. “Do you see this line?”
“I see it.”
“I told you this would hit.”
“You told me it would be funny. You ain’t say I’d have a crowd outside my office before nine.”
