Page 98 of This Could be Love

“What?”

“I can’t be together with you.”

My head was working at full speed without understanding what was going on.

“I wasn’t honest with you.”

“You weren’t honest with me?” My voice was trembling.

“I told you that I…that I used to work with computers. And that’s true, but…but only partly.”

All of a sudden, having to make do with his voice alone annoyed me immensely. I wanted to drag him into the light. To see his face. And, above all, I wanted answers. Now.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Okay,” he whispered, and I could tell that this was the beginning of a story that would change everything between us.

“Back when I was still in high school, my buddy Lance and I developed a finance app. We called itVinance. A mix of Vince, Lance, and…finance.” He sounded embarrassed. “So, the app allowed you to bundle accounts. Bank accounts, deposits, crypto, payment accounts…everything. We were so sure of it that we went toShark Tankwith it.”

“What’sShark Tank?”

“A show on ABC where you can make investors aware of you.”

“Ah.”

“One of the sharks believed in our app and invested. So, we founded a fintech company, got more investors, and so on…things kind of went through the roof. A year later we sold it for 2.5 million bucks.”

My eyes widened.

“We weren’t even eighteen.” He took a deep breath. “I wanted to invest the money in a new start-up. A payment platform. I’d had the idea for a while.” Despite the darkness, I saw him makea dismissive gesture, as if he didn’t want to go into more detail. “Lance had other plans. He’d outgrown it. He wanted to take a step back and go to college. So, off he went to Harvard, and off I went to Silicon Valley. I founded VinTech and ended up the boss of my own financial start-up at nineteen.”

“VinTech,” I repeated, more to myself than anything else, but Vince thought I was making fun of him.

“Yeah, I’ve got something with puns.”

“What did your parents have to say?”

“They would have preferred me to go to college, like Lance. Invest my money in my education.”

“But you didn’t want to.”

“I did. I mean, kind of, yeah. But here’s the funny thing.” He sounded reflective. “Secretly I knew it’d be smarter to go to a stupidly expensive elite university and get all the knowledge I needed to be at the forefront. But I was so impatient. I was just so…driven. I felt like I didn’t have any time to lose. Like it was slipping away from me.”

I swallowed audibly, and once again felt like he took my reaction the wrong way.

“I know, it sounds kinda ridiculous. A nineteen-year-old kid worrying he was going to miss the boat. But I’d had too much of the cake to put it in the freezer to eat some other day. I wanted more.” He exhaled. “My parents had no choice but to accept it. I was an adult. And financially independent.” Once again he paused briefly. “So, I moved out and went to Palo Alto. One moment Iwas in the room I’d had as a kid, the next I was Mark Zuckerberg’s neighbor.”

I stared in his direction, spellbound. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me.

“That must’ve been heavy.”

“It was. I mean, I was nineteen, on my own for the first time, and suddenly I had people working for me. They were all so talented and highly qualified. They’d studied at the best universities in the world. And now they were working forme. I felt like an impostor. I felt like I hadn’t earned being there because everyone else had such impressive backgrounds and abilities.”

“But it was your start-up.”

“Yeah, I know. And yet, I always felt like I had to prove myself anyway. To work harder than everyone else.” He paused, and I realized that everything he’d told me until now was just the tip of the iceberg. “Overnight I was in the middle of hustle culture. I worked nonstop. Every single day. Ninety, sometimes a hundred hours a week.”

“How did you manage?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.