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“I’m not sure human instinct is a good way to pick a match,” I argue. “Humans can be very foolish. I should know. I thought my last boyfriend was a great match.”
She stares at me over the glasses perched on her nose. “Why did you think he was right for you?”
I shrug. “It felt like the right time. I was approaching my late twenties, and that seemed like a good time to settle down. We had shared interests.”
“Like what?”
“Like work.” I struggle to find another thing Nick and I had in common. The sex had been pretty good in the beginning. Although nothing like what I’m having with Heath. I’m not going to tell his grandmother though. Despite what Heath said, she hasn’t pointed my way and accused me of robbing her grandchild of his innocence yet, and I’m happy to keep it that way. “We both liked dogs.”
“How many did you have?”
This isn’t going well for me. “None. We worked too much.”
She nods as though she expected that answer. “So you found someone who validated your existence.”
“I don’t know that I would put it like that.”
“How would you put it?” Lydia asks.
“I don’t know. He made me feel like…” I really can’t come up with another way to define it. She’s done it perfectly. “Okay, he didn’t bug me about working too much. I thought we were on the same page and that building the business was always going to take priority and he wouldn’t mind. Then he changed and showed his true colors, and I was so invested in work that I didn’t want to rock the boat.”
“That’s not instinct, my love. That’s your very logical brain trying to solve a problem that can only be solved with the most elusive gift in the universe.” She pats my hand. “Faith.”
She uses a word I do not understand at all. “Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m very religious.”
She shakes her head. “They don’t have to go together, Ivy. Religion is something men made as a way to find and honor the divine. I’m Catholic. Catholicism is how I relate to the idea of God. But a person without a particular religion can have faith. Faith is simply allowing that which is divine to lead you. Faith isn’t knowing. It’s the opposite. It’s accepting that you cannot in this life understand what this existence itself means and still believing there is purpose. And that purpose is simply love.”
Her words make my chest feel tight. “Yeah, I don’t have much of that.”
“You have more than you think,” she assures me. “There’s a well inside all of us. We have to find it and believe. You’re here, aren’t you? After everything that happened, you’re still here and trying to rebuild.”
I feel myself flush. “You know about my last job?”
“Of course. When I found out you were going into business with my grandson, I checked you out. I might not know how to train an AI, but I do know how to use the Internet. They were hard on you.”
Yeah, there was a reason for that. “I was on top of the world one year, and six months later I ran what should have been a thriving business into the ground.”
“I doubt that. It sounds like you weren’t given good advice.”
“I trusted the wrong people, but that’s still on me.” I trusted Nick, and he’d been asleep at the wheel. Then he’d used a clause in his contract to extricate himself from all the fallout of his mishandling and landed in an even better position than before.
“Companies get sold off all the time,” she muses. “The press was brutal with you. I suspect if you’d been a man, then Jensen Medical being sold would have barely made the news much less had big articles with glossy pictures all over the magazines. You made People.”
They’d tried to make me sound like I was another Elizabeth Holmes. My paperwork software never pretended to be a diagnostic tool, thank you very much. “As a society, we’re obsessed with women making it big, and when they fall, we’re every bit as obsessed with that. I was also a tad arrogant.”
“No, you were confident,” she argues. “You were promoting your business and yourself in the same way a man would have. You know you take a lot on yourself.”
I wasn’t sure what to do with that. “Where else would I put it?”
Lydia waves a hand. “Oh, any number of places, dear. I’ve lived a long time, and I’ve seen people deflect in ways you can’t imagine. You don’t, but you also don’t take credit for the good you do. I read a lot about Jensen Medical and how it ended up being sold. You know you could have declared bankruptcy and still come out of it with the company.”
I’d considered that scenario. “It wouldn’t have been intact, and it would have hurt my employees in a way I couldn’t handle.”
