Page 3 of Her Sizzling Billionaire
“My schedule got a lot lighter this week.”
That cracked it—just barely. A flicker at the corners of her mouth, gone before it fully landed. She sat down across from me, opened her portfolio, and clicked her pen. My general counsel excused himself. The door closed. The room got smaller.
“I have a standard set of intake questions,” she said. “Company background, timeline of the podcast appearance, your account of what was said and in what context. The goal is to give my team the raw material to build a crisis communications strategy.”
“You want to know what I said and why I said it.”
“In your words. Yes.”
“You already know what I said. You heard it in a coffee shop.”
Her pen stopped moving. She didn’t look up. A flush crept from her collar toward her jaw.
“Mr. Vale?—”
“Maddox.”
“—I’m here in a professional capacity.”
“I know. That’s what makes this interesting.”
She lifted her eyes. There it was—the same direct, unflinching look she’d given me at Bitstream when she’d told me what she’d actually do if she were handling my account. Before she’d known it was mine. Before the professional mask had gone on.
She held my gaze for two full seconds, then dropped her attention back to her portfolio. “Let’s start with the podcast. Walk me through the full conversation—not the clip, the whole thing.”
I leaned back. Three days ago, I’d entered that coffee shop because I couldn’t sit still. I’d walked three miles aroundPleasure Valley before seven a.m., trying to outpace the noise—the board calls, the PR firm the board had sicced on me, the twenty-year-old kid on the internet calling me a sociopath over fifteen seconds of audio ripped from a forty-minute conversation.
The chalkboard outside Bitstream had advertised something called a Red Eye Revival. Strong enough to match the morning I was having. So I’d gone in.
And she’d been standing in line, talking to her phone like nobody was listening.
“The podcast was forty minutes,” I said. “The host is a guy I’ve known for six years. We talked about the state of AI infrastructure, Juniper’s Q3 roadmap, the automation debate—which he brought up, and which I answered honestly.”
“The quote about a hundred salaries.”
“I said that if a company can automate a function at a tenth of the cost, no board in the country is going to vote to keep a hundred people on payroll for the sake of optics. That’s not cruelty. That’s how business works. And I said that CEOs who pretend otherwise—who go on camera with theour hearts go outspeech and then approve the layoffs anyway—are worse than the ones who just tell the truth.”
Her pen was moving again. Fast.
“That second part didn’t make the clip,” she said.
“No. It didn’t.”
“And the actual layoffs at Juniper—how were they handled?”
I looked at her. She was watching me with the same expression she’d had in the coffee shop—professional, sharp, already two moves ahead. But there was something else underneath it now. She wasn’t just gathering material. She was listening.
“Juniper eliminated eighty-three positions in January,” I said. “Every one of them got ninety days of salary continuation,twelve months of benefits, and a direct placement contact at three companies in our sector that were actively hiring. I made those calls myself. Forty-one of the eighty-three are employed again. I know because I check.”
The pen stopped. “You track their placement?”
“I made a decision that affected their lives. The least I can do is know the final outcome.”
Silence. She was looking at me differently now. The professional mask hadn’t slipped—she was too disciplined for that—but something behind it had shifted. A softening at the edges that she was trying not to let me see.
I’d spent fifteen years watching people fake it in boardrooms. CEOs who practiced their empathy faces in bathroom mirrors. PR consultants who coached their clients to saywe hear youwhile meaningwe need this to go away. Investors who toasted layoffs at private dinners and posted condolences the next morning. I found every last one of them repulsive, and I’d built my entire career on refusing to be one.
The cost of that was a fifteen-second clip and millions of people who thought I was a monster.
