Page 30 of Julian

It shouldn’t feel like anything. It’s small talk. A professional courtesy people say and don’t mean.

Except Julian Langley, from everything I’ve observed in the last two days, doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.

Chapter 8

Julian

The Vipers are up two goals in the first period and the owner’s box is loud with the energy of VIPs who enjoy winning more than they enjoy hockey.

I stand at the half wall that splits the main suite from the balcony seats, my drink untouched on the rail beside me. Grizz sets up in the offensive zone, focus and confidence radiating from his frame. He’s different out there on the ice, like his personal force of nature brand has settled, and in that, he’s more powerful.

I call that the “Daisy effect” and I expect he’d give her the credit too.

Behind me, the room is filled with the same who’s who, the names and faces who get invites to these games. Sponsors, front office execs, a handful of league contacts I invited for the optics. City officials, other billionaires who run in my circles. It’s the same crowd every night and I have to wonder what it would be like with a bunch of non-jaded, hockey-obsessed kids instead. Obviously, Harper’s idea on how to hype up this city to host an All-Star Game has me thinking.

Glasses clink and someone laughs too loudly at a joke that probably wasn’t that funny, but I’m walled off from it, my attention on what’s really important… the game. I know I should be circulating but I stay at the glass.

Grizz takes a pass off the boards, pivots cleanly and sends it cross-ice to Coen Highsmith—a prized trade from the Pittsburgh Titans last year—who one-times it past the goalie before the man even shifts his weight. The goal horn erupts and the suite behind me surges with noise.

Three nothing.

I allow myself a private moment of satisfaction and take a sip of my drink.

The game is good. The team is cohesive in a way that felt theoretical three months ago and is now simply fact. Everything from an organizational standpoint is moving in the right direction.

The All-Star proposal is with my creative team who are adding texture and specificity to the community campaign framework, which Harper came up with in a four-minute conversation on her first day of work with me as my driver.

And that thought, predictably, leads to additional ruminations about my newest employee. It’s a conundrum why she keeps inserting herself into my thoughts. Therefore, I’m forced to examine it—what is it about her specifically?

The obvious answer is the one I discount first, not because it isn’t true but because it’s insufficient. Yes, she’s beautiful, objectively and undeniably so. But I’ve been in the company of beautiful women my entire adult life and none have taken up residence in my thoughts with this annoying level of stubbornness.

So it isn’t that. Or it isn’t only that.

My hypothesis, then, is that it’s the mind behind the face.

The ticketing crisis, for example. I’d only just met her, and she offered a solution my entire operations staff had circled for hours. She delivered it from the front seat of a Town Car and did so from a position of vulnerability. I didn’t know it then, but I later learned she had lost her primary job less than twenty-four hours before and yet that didn’t stop her from going out on a limb with me.

And then the All-Star idea. The community campaign, the children from the Bronx, the organic groundswell that reframes the entire bid narrative. She built it at a lunch table while eating an eighty-dollar steak with the awkward restraint of someone pretending it wasn’t the best thing they’d ever tasted.

Then there’s the phone call I shamelessly eavesdropped on. I only heard her side of it, but what I did hear was magnificent. She listened attentively, giving nothing away in her expression or body language. She didn’t lose her temper but calmly identified the weakness in the principal’s position, applied exactly the right pressure, and extracted the outcome she wanted while offering enough concession to let the man believe he’d participated in the decision.

That was all street smarts, instinct and grit most likely shaped by years of only relying on herself to get things done. At least, that’s the image I’ve built in my head, but I’d love to know more about why she is the way she is.

Which brings me to what I don’t know.

I know she grew up on the Lower East Side and that she’s a hustler and a survivor. I know she has a younger brother she clearly adores and would go to war for without hesitation. I know she tried college, found it not to her liking, and walked away without apparent regret.

It could be considered way too much information for an employer to know about their new employee, and yet it isn’t enough. For the past two days, every time I’ve tried to find out more, she has closed the distance with the polite, practiced efficiency of someone who has decided exactly how much of herself is appropriate to offer an employer.

I get short answers in a professional manner. While I still insist on sitting in the front seat of the Range Rover, she doesn’t look at me at all. It’s eyes forward, hands on the wheel, attention focused on the road.

It’s not unfriendly but it’s deliberate. She’s intentionally putting up a wall between us and I wonder why. It could be simple professionalism—a boundary she’s drawn and intends to hold because that’s really the way of the business world. You don’t fraternize with your superior or your subordinate.

That I can respect. I drew similar lines myself for years, between what I offer and what I withhold from others, between the public version of myself and the real version only a select few see.

But could it be something else that has her maintaining a professional distance? Is she keeping the distance because proximity is dangerous to her in some way?

The thought arrives without warning, and I sit with it, turning it over.