CHAPTER ONE
EVAN
THE ALARM GOES OFF AT 4:30 AM. I don’t notice the darkness. I haven’t risen after the sun since I was twenty.
This is the most relaxing part of my day. I have fifteen minutes to grab coffee and scan for important messages before it all begins. I also maintain a small, read-only LiveLyfe account that not even the programmers know about. I check it like a guilty pleasure each morning.
I’m not really “friends” with anyone on it, and they don’t know I’m watching them, but the private feed gives me a connection to the people I knew before I became the Evan Cohen the press discusses so much today. Ironically, I don’t care about most of the people whose posts I watch. My family matters, as do the few friends I’ve stayed in touch with, but who are the rest of these people I decided to plunk into my classic-Evan feed? Nerds, jocks, burnouts, and honor students from high school. Kids I worked with in the college bookstore before dropping out. They’re so distant, and yet I keep tabs. Just because. It’s a tether that holds my center as everything else changes.
My thumb flies through the feed. I learn that Clark McDougall, who used to steal my lunch money in elementary school, just had his fifth kid. He’s my age, 27. Started early and budded often. He got fat, bald, and was recently fired for assaulting his boss. He’s part of a LiveLyfe group for recovering addicts. His posts make it clear that he’s not entirely back. Part of me wants to revel in his slide from hero to zero, but I never quite can. It’s not that I’ve risen above spite. It’s that the days when I feared Clark seem like another life, too distant to care about now.
Relaxation ends when my timer goes off. I always set it for 4:43, so I have time to shift my brain.
Thirteen minutes. That’s all I need. Or at least, that’s all I get.
4:45 AM. Coffee with Grace. She’s in Hong Kong and I’m in Austin, so this time works better for her than for me. We have fifteen minutes, Bluetooth on as I drink my first cup and organize my messenger bag’s folders for the day. Then it’s headset off, and into the shower. I’ll need to hang up. Grace is cool, but I don’t want her hearing me shower as we move to speakerphone if we go long on this morning’s call.
I can bump my evening run from its current spot after my slot with Marty (is that a dinner meeting? Mental note to text Jack) to now, talk to Grace while I exercise, then shower afterward. My hair will still be wet when I take my video call with the VoiceTek people, but it’s an option. And if Grace has to hear me grind through my run to finish our conversation, so be it.
We end on time.
5:05 AM. Text Jack, get an answer. The Marty meeting is on 6th Street at a gastropub. But it’s not dinner. I have dinner after with Caspian’s people and man, am I not looking forward to that.
Next, I dictate the notes I jotted to myself last night when I woke up at 2 AM, about the new sharing module for LiveLyfe. It takes a little longer than I’d planned because I can’t read my handwriting and because now my mom is trying to call me.
Come on, Mom, get with the program.
I love her dearly, but I don’t have time. Especially not today. I should never have told her that I race the dawn. She’s Eastern time, and I’m Central. 6 AM in Roanoke is early but doable for her, so recently she seems to have decided 5am-ish is the ideal time to catch me.
I’ll catch Evan before he gets too busy for the day. Nobody’s schedule is full at the crack of dawn.
Ha.
5:20 AM. Feel guilty, call Mom on her landline using my assistant’s phone. Answering the landline occupies her and assures that when I call her cell phone using mine thirty seconds later, I’ll get her voicemail. This maneuver lets me tell my mom that I miss her without burning time in conversation. Caspian taught me that little trick, except that he used to do it with one-night stands. I don’t think he has a mother. I imagine Baby Caspian crawled out of a seed pod covered with poison thorns, fully formed and wearing a suit.
It only takes me ten minutes to gather what I’m going to need for the first part of my day.
Phone: check.
Messenger bag, fully stocked and organized: check.
Paper organizer, my lucky pen, a full bottle of water, headphones (charged overnight), gym bag (stocked, also by Sam): check.
I’m out the door by 5:30. Despite my checklist, I nearly forget my dress shoes because I couldn’t carry them and don’t normally need to take them. Curtis is waiting out front. I hand him my gear, say, “Hang on,” and run back inside. It takes me three minutes to find my shoes. I’ll have to make them up somewhere.
“Good morning, Mr. Cohen,” he says as I get in.
Curtis used to come around and open the door for me. Until I told him to knock it off. Now he gets behind the wheel and waits for me to situate myself, though I can tell it offends his driver’s code to let the boss lift a finger.
“Good morning, Curtis. And I told you: Evan. Mr. Cohen is my father.”
“Of course.”
Fucking Curtis. It’s been six months.
We pull out of the roundabout driveway, through the gate, down the private drive. I see a deer in my peripheral vision, and I watch it go through the gate before it closes. Great. Now the security system will be confused. The deer around here infest the place like rats. Some widow in a 16,000-square foot monstrosity up the road feeds them in her yard. I’d ask her to stop, but she seems to need something to fill her time. From what I hear, she spends ten grand a week on flowers for her house and doesn’t even like them. She does it because the delivery people and decorators give her someone to talk to.
“Busy day, Mr. Cohen?”
“Evan.”
“My name is Curtis, sir.”
I catch his mischievous smirk in the rearview. Asshole. I should have hired a more laid back driver without a sense of humor. Curtis’s deviousness coexists with that stick he seems to have up his ass. It’s confusing.
“Busy day,” I reply, giving up.
“Such a change of pace for you.”
“I know. I hear.”
“If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion, Mr. Cohen …”
“No, you may not.”
“Sam tells me that a quarter of what you do could easily be outsourced to assistants. That would leave you with an insane schedule, rather than a back-breaking one.”
“My back is fine, Curtis, thanks.”
“Sam says you’re a control freak. That you won’t even let him post on LiveLyfe’s blog for you. Or write your emails.”
I roll my eyes, though Curtis can’t see it. It’s hard to be in charge with all these wiseasses around me.
I move to raise the partition. Curtis stops me before it’s halfway up.
“Sir?”
“You mean, Evan?”
“Sir, if I could make an observation …”
“Which you can’t.”
“You’re the only person any of us have ever known who has a full staff, yet handles all of his business correspondence.”
I press the button again. The partition raises the rest of the way.
I’m alone. Finally. Slightly irked.
Curtis was insubordinate, but also inaccurate. I don’t handle all of my business correspondence — just the most vital pieces. Curtis doesn’t understand that I’m a public person and that every word I say or write is scrutinized. I have to be precise, and that’s especially true when it comes to the blog. I write some of the most important stuff, but always under a pseudonym. I’m the only boss in the world that ghost-writes for my employees as if I’m trying to save them time. But it’s not about that. It’s about keeping the fine edge between professional and personal. I’m an introvert who acts like an extrovert. I value my privacy more than just about anything. I hate that the press is always up my ass. I hate people coming to my house to hang on the gates. And I really hate people talking to me at the urinal of a public restroom.
For the most part, I’ve managed to keep the public eye away from my parents, the rest of my family, and that pocket of my past that I’ve preserved in my secret LiveLyfe feed. That’s not an easy feat. It comes from doing what I do, how I do it, and not exposing more of myself than necessary. I don’t go out much. I don’t let myself be seen while off LiveLyfe’s clock. And I for damn sure don’t write updates as myself on the LiveLyfe blog — or let Sam write them for me.
Maybe I should fire Curtis. Maybe I should fire Sam. I won’t, though. They’re both excellent at what they do, and treat me with a perfect balance of respect and ball-busting. It’s as if I’ve hired my college buddies, even though both of them have worked for people twice as rich as I am, and four times as stodgy.
I tap the screen to dictate some notes. I’m about to lose my mental list.
“Check gluten-free for Omni dinner,” I tell the screen. “Talk to Delilah about sending Adam to the Nashville conference. Send Sam to ATM.”
That last one needs to happen today because tonight I’m seeing my acupuncturist and I don’t think she’s in the country legally, though I’d never ask. She’s never told me she needs to run a cash business, but I’ve figured it out. I don’t want to cause any problems. She has three kids and is clearly doing her best.
“Oh,” I tell the screen. “And check on Layla Sky.”
I watch the dictation turn my words into type, but seeing Layla’s name in print makes me uneasy — the wrong person could see it and pierce my carefully held privacy bubble.
I erase my last note and manually add a task to my list: Check on LS. I don’t know Layla, but I’ve seen her work cross my desk. It’s great. And recently, little birds told me that her sister posted a GoFundMe on LiveLyfe, though Layla didn’t share it. I need to confirm, but rumor says that Layla just lost her husband. She, like my acupuncturist, has three kids. Perfect candidate for Project Angel.
This complete, I pull up the recording of my call with Development from yesterday, knowing I need to re-familiarize myself with what we discussed before today’s 2 PM meeting. I check the time (5:50) and guess at the minutes left to my gym (maybe 13) and realize that I’m going to need to play the call back at double speed if I want to get through it all before we arrive.
I’m adapting to the rapid-fire conversation when the recording fades, and my phone starts to ring. Annoyed that I’ll apparently need to review the call later, I answer on the car’s speakers.
It’s my executive assistant, Taylor. She’s closer to a right-hand and probably knows more of LiveLyfe’s confidential information than I do. She makes me feel lazy. She’s been married for six days and only took two hours off for her wedding. I told Taylor to take a honeymoon, but she refused, saying, “Carl knows who he married.”