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This I learned from Summer, his daughter and the best source of information on all things Tate.
I have to fetch her from school one day when Summer’s nanny calls in sick. I find the school, then wait outside for the girl to jump in. I drive her home after buying her a MacDonalds burger for lunch.
“My father would fire you if he knew you gave me this for lunch,” Summer remarks, looking at me cannily.
I shrug. “I wasn’t hired as your cook.”
The fridge is filled with all kinds of readymade meals with labels like quinoa and lentils or brown rice pilaf. Apparently there is an executive chef who comes in every morning to cook and leave for the day. Summer was supposed to eat some pumpkin green curry today.
She grins at me. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” she says, tucking into the burger with gusto.
“Deal!”
Later, after I’ve finished helping her with her homework, she asks me how it is going working for her father.
“Not well,” I admit. “I don’t think he likes me a lot.” Confiding in a child is a new low for me. But it turns out to be the best thing I could have done.
“Dad hates being a boss,” she tells me. “He wants to be creative. But he needs space to do that, for his thoughts to fly.” She makes hand movements to indicate birds flying.
“Really?”
“How do you think he came up with Calmia?” she asks me. The app, a best-selling mental health program, became a bestseller a few years ago. I have used it myself, although not since coming to work for Tate Sagarro. Now it seems a bit close to home, somehow.
“He was cave diving,” Summer tells me. “He got this idea of people being underwater, surrounded by calm and tranquility, cutting out all noise, all sound.”
“Then he got other people to build it?” I ask.
She nods. “That’s what he loves to do, think up ideas. Not sit at a desk and answer phones. That’s what he has you for.”
This is how the penny drops. Because by now I know that I desperately want this job to work out. I don’t really know why, except that Tate is like no one I have ever met. He is simultaneously wonderful and terrible, arrogant and funny, incredibly smart but terribly obtuse about some things.
Thanks to Summer, I know to cut his diary down to two calls a day, maximum.
I filter all his messages out. In the mornings, I wait for him before he goes running, firing words at him like balls from a tennis machine.
“Wallace DeBryan?” I might say.
“Yeah?” He could reply if mildly interested.
“You want to do a ten minute catch-up call?”
“No.”
That will be it. No call.
I still get it wrong, but two weeks later, I’ve still got a job and I start to think that maybe, just maybe, I’ll get the hang of this after all. It is exhilarating to be a part of this process, of facilitating genius. Maybe a small part of it is attraction too, but I can’t admit to any of this.
Not yet.
Tate is my boss and I can’t let feelings get in the way of the process.
At least, this is what I tell myself.
Until the night of the Kigana presentation.
Kigana Play is a Japanese game company that has come to the US and has been trying to get a meeting with Tate for weeks. I put them off by letting them meet with one of Tate’s most trusted developers, a guy called Haroon, whom he trusts implicitly when it comes to tech development. A meeting was set up for the Kigana delegation and I was asked to draft some brochures and come up with a presentation. The meeting was set up for early the next morning.
Then, as I’m putting finishing touches on the brochures, which I have just spent hours getting right, Tate calls me and tells me the meeting is off.
