“Does it make you feel more professional?”
“Iamprofessional.”
“I know.” His mouth moved—that almost-smile I’d spent three days trying not to think about. “That’s what worries me.”
He walked me through the building. Engineering on four and five. Product on six. Marketing, Legal, Operations stacked above.
The floors were open-plan and sunlit, clusters of standing desks broken up by glass-walled meeting rooms and living walls with trailing greenery. People said hi to him—not the stiff, performative greeting employees give a CEO they’re afraid of. Casual. First names. A woman from engineering stopped him to ask about her daughter’s soccer game, and he knew the score.
I was there to build a sizzle reel. That was the term I’d pitched Tasha on Monday—a short, high-impact video designed to reframe his public narrative. Not an apology tour. Not a scripted mea culpa. A sizzle reel. Fifteen seconds had torn him down. Sixty could rebuild him, if the raw material was real.
The raw material was real.
I’d known that since Friday’s intake meeting, when he’d told me about the ninety days of salary continuation and the placement calls he’d made himself. But hearing a CEO say the right things in a conference room wasn’t evidence. I’d built enough client profiles to know the difference between what people claimed and what the record showed.
“I want to see the placement data,” I said. “The tracking you mentioned on Friday. If it’s going to anchor the sizzle reel, I need to see the documentation.”
He stopped walking. We were on the seventh floor, standing between a glass conference room and a wall covered in framed photos of company retreats. His jaw shifted.
“That’s not public information.”
“It doesn’t have to be. I need to verify it so I can build the narrative around confirmed facts.”
“It’s not a narrative. It’s a spreadsheet.”
“Then show me the spreadsheet.”
He looked at me for a long beat. Something was working behind his expression—not resistance, exactly. Reluctance. He’d worked quietly because doing it loudly would’ve been making a show of it. And now I was asking him to hand it over to a woman whose entire job was making a show of things.
“This way,” he said.
His office was on the eleventh floor. Corner, floor-to-ceiling glass, a desk that looked like he actually used it—papers, a half-empty coffee mug, two monitors, side by side. He pulled up a file and turned the screen toward me without sitting down.
Eighty-three names. Current employer. Start date. Salary range. Notes column—short, blunt, clearly written by him.
Offered to ConnectBase, started March. Relocated to Austin, wife’s family. Took a teaching position, seems happy. Still looking—sent her resume to Connie at Helix last week.
Forty-one placed. Nine in active conversations. Thirty-three still in the pipeline. He hadn’t just tracked them. He was still working on it. Five months later.
“You never told anyone about this,” I said.
“I’m not interested in getting credit for doing the bare minimum.”
“Maddox, this isn’t the bare minimum. Most CEOs don’t even know how many people they laid off, let alone where they ended up.”
“Most CEOs are full of shit.”
I stared at the screen. The notes were the part that undid me. Not the numbers—the tone.Seems happy. A billionaire CEO tracking whether a former junior data analyst seemed happy in her new teaching job. Not because anyone was watching. Not because it would play well in a sizzle reel. Because he’d made a decision that changed their lives and he refused to look away from the aftermath.
My heart ached. The professional wall I’d been maintaining since Friday—the one I rebuilt every morning and every night, the one that kept Maddox Vale in the category of client instead of the category of man I can’t stop thinking about—developed a crack I could feel spreading in real time.
“This is the sizzle reel,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I intended. “Right here. This is the piece of the truth the clip cut out.”
He closed the file. “I didn’t show you that so you could put it on camera.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
