Saving the CEO(23)

“Still fancy!” Cassie laughed.

He shrugged. “It’s just Bluetooth.”

She performed an exaggerated shrug in return. “I guess I’m a cheap date.” But then she crossed her arms, narrowed her eyes, and gazed up at the screen. For a minute the only thing that moved in the room were her eyeballs. He could practically see the gears turning in her head.

“Okay. What will Wexler expect me to know? I guess maybe the best thing is to just keep going back in time, so I can get a sense of the company’s recent history?”

Silently, he projected another file onto the screen. Another jumble of numbers. He was accustomed to not “getting” numbers. When he was alone like this, or with someone he trusted—and somehow Cassie, whom he’d known for all of four days, fell into that category—they didn’t send him into a panic. He didn’t fully process what he saw, but since no one was expecting him to, it didn’t really matter.

She turned. “What is it like, seeing all this?”

Had she read his mind? “You mean with the dyscalculia?”

“Yeah. Is it like looking at another language?” Then she added, “But only answer if you want to. It’s none of my business.”

“It’s a little like another language. But it’s not that I can’t identify numbers.” He pointed to a cell on the spreadsheet. “I know a seven when I see it.” He pointed to another number, one in red. “Or a negative one hundred grand—that’s bad, right?” She whipped her eyes to his, adorably gullible. He grinned. “I know that’s bad—I’m just teasing. I know the numbers; I just can’t put them together very well. I can’t do anything with them.” He cocked his head. No one had ever asked him to explain before. His father had tried to beat it out of him, but never once had anyone asked what it felt like. “It’s kind of like this,” he said, an analogy crystallizing itself in his mind. “If I taught you to say something in Japanese, you could learn how to say it. Like, Tamago kudasai.”

“You do not speak Japanese!” she exclaimed.

“I do, a little, but that’s not the point. Tamago kudasai. Say it.”

“Taman…” She crunched up her nose, and he instructed himself not to lean over and lick it.

He helped her again, and she mastered the foreign phrase.

“What does it mean?”

“Eggs, please.”

She laughed in incredulous delight. “What?”

“My point is, you could learn how to say it. I could teach you the context in which you should say it. Every time a waiter came to your table at breakfast, you could say it, and the waiter would bring you eggs, the expected outcome. But that doesn’t mean you know what you’re saying. For all you know, you could be asking for watermelon. Or a telephone. You just have to trust, to go through the motions, and assume that what’s happening is what’s supposed to happen.”

“I get it. It sounds…awful.”

He shrugged. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Once it was diagnosed, I got some therapy and learned some strategies. And at least then I finally understood I wasn’t stupid.”

She blew out a dismissive breath. “You are about as far from stupid as it’s possible to get, my friend.”

My friend. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “Well, my father took a different view of the matter.”

“I’m sure he sees the light now.” She gestured to the projection.

“He’s dead. And even if he wasn’t…” Jack trailed off. There was no point trying to make her understand his father when he himself had never managed it.

“And your mother?”

“Also dead. Before my father, in fact. My parents were in their early forties when they had me—they’d been trying for more than a decade and had resigned themselves to remaining childless.”

“And then they had the miracle baby!”

The “miracle baby” who disappointed them every step of the way. But judging by Cassie’s moony expression, she was charmed by the fictional version of his family she’d conjured. “Anyway,” he nodded at the numbers on the screen. “The truth is, I don’t really understand what I see.”

“All the more amazing that you built such a successful company.”

“Carl deserves a lot of the credit. He’s been with me from the beginning. He was…” God, he didn’t know what made him more angry, Carl’s betrayal, or the fact that he was so gutted by it. “He always covered for me—I thought.”

She was looking at him with sympathy, but not, amazingly, pity. “Well, for what it’s worth, I thought he seemed like a complete asshole.”