Learning Curve by Michael S. Malone Page A

saying that Aidan had an unexcused absence from her Geometry class. I called the office and told them she’d had a doctor’s appointment—but I was lying. And when I hit her up about it last night, she told me her period had started and she was in the bathroom and late for class and didn’t want to get hassled by her teacher, so she didn’t go.
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    I knew she was lying. She cut class. And tonight she was talking a mile a minute, then she turned moody and emotional. I’m sure she did more than just cut school.
    Oh, Dan, I’m so worried about her. And I feel so helpless. If I accuse her and I’m wrong, she’ll never forgive me. But if I’m right, it could be even worse not to do something.
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    I know how busy you are, honey, but I could sure use your help on this. Is there any way you can come home earlier than you’d planned? And if not, can you call and talk to Aidan? I need to hear your opinion after you’ve had a chance to talk to her.

    â€œNo, I can’t come home early,” Dan said bitterly to the screen. “Do you have any idea what I’m dealing with?” I’ve got 32,000 lives, he thought—32,000 families —depending on me to get the company through this clusterfuck. They trust me. They depend on me. And I have to pretend like I know what I’m doing… and I don’t. And all you’ve got on your plate are the problems of one single teenage girl—which probably aren’t real anyway. Aidan’s always been a good girl—and you’re telling me you can’t handle it?
    He rubbed his face again. Jesus, Annabelle, do I have to do everything? I thought we were in this together. He believed himself misjudged and abandoned—and that was a satisfying feeling.
    But neither the booze nor the anger was enough to cover Dan’s gnawing sense that he was wrong. That it was always a mistake to question his wife’s judgment. And worst of all, that he was being a poor husband and father.
    He started to type a reply, but realized he didn’t know what to say, and couldn’t even formulate a proper sentence. He closed the laptop and dragged himself to bed.

v. 3.4
    T he Pacific Ocean was black and endless and almost indistinguishable from the sky, except for a few bright stars that burned their way through the scrim of the plane’s thick windows. Sydney to Tokyo. Eleven hours—just two to go. Alison flicked on her overhead light and looked around.
    Jenny Randall, eTernity’s business development director and the only other woman on the road show, sat beside her, reading Jane Austen. “I figured this might be my only chance,” she’d said when Alison had first noticed it. The six men on the trip—four from eTernity, two from the underwriter—were all camped out asleep in various states of discomfort. Alison could hear at least two of them snoring. And after ten days and 23,000 miles into the twelve-day trip, the chartered airplane cabin smelled of dirty clothes, sweat, and over-applied deodorant—hotel sinks and laundry services notwithstanding.
    Alison knew she should be asleep too—she’d been up for twenty-two hours—but after the raucous, upbeat presentation in Australia, she was still pumped with adrenalin. Can this IPO really happen? she asked herself. More important now, could it really be as big as some analysts were predicting—$45 per share? Nobody in tech had seen that kind of launch since the crazy old days of the Dot.com bubble.
    Over the last two months, she had formed her two management teams—one for eTernity under Armstrong, one for the road show; she had checked every fact and parsed every sentence of the company’s prospectus, and helped put together the road show presentation materials. She had been so relentlessly focused that she’d scarcely had time to think about the ultimate goal itself.
    And some of that had been intentional.