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Hannah sprang from the bed, opening the door. “What is it?”
I caught a glimpse of Lauren’s pale face. “It’s bad.”
I didn’t have to hear more. I felt it in my gut. Li Na’s back—and she’s not taking no for an answer.
That was fine by me. This time, I’d be ready. This time, I’d keep Hannah safe.
This time, I’d end it.
Chapter 4
Li Na
People, even smart people, fail to recognize the finite nature of time. There are limits. The limits need to be observed carefully, because otherwise, one day you’ll wake up old and blindsided, on the other side of a life that had no meaning.
I’d gotten married in my twenties because my parents expected me to. Before I blinked, I’d wasted ten years trying to figure out if my husband was happy with me or not. Then I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t care. Why should I? My husband had been a distraction, something I put in my own way to keep myself from my true potential. I would never get those ten years back. Ten years of dinners. Ten years of leaving the office to go home. Ten years of being a dutiful wife and daughter.
Such a waste.
I stood at my desk, examining the latest testing results from Protocol Therapeutics. But my thoughts kept going back to those ten years. I hated it when my mind wandered, but I’d noticed it did so for a reason, connecting dots I’d assumed were unrelated.
When I’d gotten divorced, I moved to an apartment. I bought a coffeemaker, a couch, and a bed, knowing guests and entertaining wouldn’t be an issue. My parents were dead. My husband had remarried. I didn’t bother socializing with friends—I just got to work.
It was the happiest I’d ever been.
Cutting things out of my life, even things that others deemed important, like relationships, remained one of the smartest things I’d ever done. I’d acted like a heart surgeon with a scalpel, trimming the unwanted growth from my heart. All that remained was me. Me and my commitment.
I pulled up Protocol’s website. The remarkable people at the company had developed a groundbreaking antibody therapy to treat cancer. The technology was amazing, faster and more promising than anything that had come before it. The problem, as I saw it, was Protocol’s CEO, Fiona Pace. Her vision remained too narrow. She was bending over backward conducting clinical trials, when the reports from the last round conclusively showed the technology worked.
What Fiona Pace didn’t realize was the same thing Lauren Taylor hadn’t realized: time waits for no one. Ultimately, I was on their side. I might not be able to organically recreate the level of innovation either woman had achieved, but I had the vision and the international business acumen to bring each of their technologies to full realization. I planned to take over the global healthcare market by assembling an arsenal of the most groundbreaking technology in existence.
It didn’t matter who invented it. It didn’t matter how I acquired it. What mattered was the outcome.
I’d assembled a world-class team here in Shenzhen. My company was poised to launch a broad range of technologies and services to providers all over the world. What my enemies didn’t understand, what they failed to see in their panicked, emotional reactions, was that providing a unified approach to the market was the best thing for everyone. And I didn’t just mean for the CEOs—I meant for every citizen of the world.
But Fiona and Lauren were too invested to see the big picture. Yet another reason I wished they were from any country other than America. As a rule, American women annoyed me. Fiona Pace’s book about American women in the workplace really annoyed me. In it, she discussed at length how lots of women she knew withdrew from their careers because of guilt about their families and the competitive, demanding nature of corporate America. She suggested ways to remedy this so that women stayed in the workforce and achieved more senior and management positions.
Fiona’s book pinpointed exactly what annoyed me most about American women. There was too much guilt. Always with the guilt, and the overanalyzing. They would tweet, whine, and workshop about the “hows” and the “whys” of women in the workplace, the existence of the glass ceiling and what to do about it, the existence of their guilt and what to do about it, when they should just shut up and keep working. If there was a glass ceiling, why not shatter it and grab a shard as a weapon? And if someone was in your way—like your boss or your husband? Wield the shard, elbow them out of the picture, then step on them with your high heel.
Otherwise, what were high heels for?
Despite their brilliance and their access to heels, I’d watched both Lauren and Fiona hesitate. In the current healthcare market, hesitation translated into death. Lauren had come to her senses and stopped sitting on her technology, but only after I’d threatened her. That seemed to have woken her up. But since she’d launched the patch, what else had she accomplished?
Nothing. And Fiona Pace was busy following suit. She’d conducted clinical trial after clinical trial, money and influence slipping through her fingers as she chased her tail. I’d offered her the opportunity to position her technology globally, to launch it as aggressively as possible.
And she’d turned me down.
I looked out the window at the bustling streets of Shenzhen. It was less foggy here than in Beijing, a fact I relished. They called my city the Silicon Valley of China, but soon, the titles would be reversed. That was on my short list of goals. I’d promised the people who worked for me and my government that Jiàn Innovations would deliver. We would put Shenzhen on the map, in the center of technological and global influence. In return, they’d promised their loyalty and unwavering support.
They were believers. And maybe, if I wasn’t imagining it, they were a little afraid of me.
I thought about my apartment again, the bare walls and the bed I rarely slept in. I loved my home. I’d traded my boring, traditional life for the promise of my own mind. It was the same promise I’d made to
my people, the same promise they saw in me.
Seeing was believing.
I’d failed to deliver Paragon and the patch, but I understood the power of failure. Now that I knew what didn’t work, I would utilize what remained.
