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His face dropped and her ire rose. Was he really that deluded? Did he believe this was a social exercise? That sexist informality was his gateway to acquiring her most prized possession?
She watched him examine her office, taking in the stark icy blue minimalist decor with faint disdain before lingering for several seconds on the velvet grey sofa.
‘Well, shall we make ourselves comfortable, Genie?’ he asked, his American twang thickening as he waved her towards the sofa instead of the small conference table she’d opted to use for her other meetings.
His blithe refusal of her request stiffened her spine and made up her mind. ‘No. I don’t think this is going to work, Mr Graham.’
His face morphed from condescension to anger. ‘Excuse me? You haven’t even heard my offer.’
‘Do you even understand how my algorithm works?’ The beauty of her highly sophisticated predictive algorithm was that it could work wonders for a farmer in Peru in accurately projecting weather patterns, long term soil viability and a plethora of advantages. The bad news was that in the wrong hands, it could also be weaponised to give military advantage to a ruthless dictator. Hence her being at pains to ensure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.
He shrugged. ‘Not in its entirety, but I have a few dozen clever geeks back in Silicon Valley who are very excited about it and ready to put it to great use. So why don’t we talk numbers?’
‘No.’ She considered the social cue. Then disregarded it. Frank Graham didn’t deserve herthanks for coming. He’d wasted her time. Precious time she’d never recoup.
Anger reddened his face. ‘Now, look here. I flew in from California especially for this meeting. You can’t just dismiss me without hearing me—’
‘I can and I just have.’ Striding to her desk, she pressed the button for her secretary, then another one that automated her office door.
It swung smoothly open, and Genie breathed a sigh of relief to see the two burly guards standing in the doorway.
Yes, she had been reduced to employing bodyguards because in moments like these, and as she’d discovered in the last six months, it was effective in deterring the men in suits who didn’t have qualms about taking what was hers.
Frank Graham looked ready to force the issue, until he saw the security and changed his mind. It didn’t stop him from sneering, ‘Little girls who think they can play in a man’s world get what’s coming to them, eventually. Mark my words.’
‘I won’t. In fact, I’ve already forgotten them. Good day, Mr Graham.’
She kept her posture and her expression intact despite the knot of despair tightening in her stomach. But the moment the door shut behind the odious man, she sagged into her chair, then twisted it around to stare unseeing out of the window.
She registered neither the tourist boat floating lazily down the river nor the unseasonably bright blue skies overhead. Neither the acrobat entertaining passers-by on his tiny unicycle nor the group of young students sharing a joke over their lunch.
But the young mother pushing a stylish little pram caught her eye. Pulled agonisingly hard on her heartstrings.
Her dream. Her one wish. Now even farther away than it’d been this morning.
Her posture deflated further until Genie suspected she could disappear into the giant chair she hated but which the decorator had insisted was the right symbol to project power and dominance.
Genie had declined to point out that she didn’t need outward trappings to demonstrate her worth. Her power and dominance came from her superior brain power. Her Rhodes Scholar accolades and the Girl Genius label the media liked to crow about, despite her being twenty-eight instead of eight, spoke volumes for themselves.
She should’ve taken her business team’s advice and let them broker this deal on her behalf. But wouldn’t that have been more painful than putting herself through the torture of social confrontation with strangers? Wouldn’t sitting in her lab downstairs, blissfully surrounded by her super computers and out of the way but having others decide on the fate of her life’s work, have been even more excruciating?
A breath shuddered out of her, her forlorn gaze resting on the mother who’d paused to coo at her baby and following them until they were out of view.
Yes, it would’ve been excruciating, but she wouldn’t be here, taking a front-row seat to her own failure.
Affirm the positive. Don’t dwell on the negative.
This time her snort ripped free, tinged by a dart of guilt.
Dr Douglas wouldn’t have approved. He would’ve called it ‘an unfortunate social miscue’.
But Dr Douglas had retired a long time ago, and then shortly after that, her Christmas card had been ‘returned to sender’ because he’d passed away.
She was on her own. Alone and circling the drain of failure.
The soft whine of her door made her grit her teeth. Was she to be denied even this rare moment of self-pity?
‘We’re done for the day, Lily.’ She scrambled through her morose thoughts and summoned further socially accepted words for her assistant. ‘I am...grateful for your help. We did, however, fall far short of our goals, so—’
