“Lenny! What’re you having?” I asked, the chauffeur rolling down the window after I gave it a knock.

“Depends,” he said with a smirk. “You buying?”

“That mean the usual?” I asked.

“Yep—two slices, green pepper and chicken with extra cheese.”

“You got it,” I said before turning my attention back to Chelsea.

She looked the picture of beauty in her dress, her body bathed in the neon lights behind her, a slight, charming smile playing on her lips. Tonight wasn’t the first ball I’d been to with a beautiful woman on my arm, but I’d be damned if she wasn’t the most gorgeous I’d ever had the pleasure of escorting.

I opened the door to the pizza shop, letting Chelsea in first. We both ordered, and after a brief wait, had our slices and soda.

“God, these look so greasy and delicious,” she said.

I agreed.

“And there’s one more thing about this place I love. Aside from the greasy pizza.”

I turned to one of the guys working the counter.

“Upstairs still open?” I asked.

“Sure thing, Mr. Carver,” he said, nodding toward the service door.

“Come on,” I said.

I opened the service door to reveal a small, low-lit staircase that led up. At the top was another door. I gave it a push, opening out onto the roof of the building: a small, simple space with a few tables. But the view was the real winner here—it was a sweeping vista that looked out onto Golden Gate Park.

“Pretty nice for a pizza joint,” she said.

“And the pizza’s not half-bad either,” I replied.

The two of us took our seats and set into our pizza right away. Chelsea folded her slice in half and took down half of it in a single bite.

“Damn,” I said, watching the display. “You know how to eat.”

“I know, right!” she said, her mouth full.

Her hands shot to her mouth as she finished chewing and swallowed.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I go crazy when I’m hungry. It’s like a circus act or something.”

“I like a girl who likes to eat,” I said. “Better than those girls who eat their pizza with a knife and fork.”

The two of us devoured our first slices. After washing them down with some soda, we sat back contently.

“So,” I said, wiping my hands. “You want to be my new CTO.”

Chelsea raised her eyebrows.

“Then we are talking shop after all,” she said.

“Yes and no,” I said. “I was thinking about how well you handled yourself tonight, how once you got over your initial hesitancy, you were able to go toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful people in the city. So, between that and your killer business history, it’s looking like this plan of ours might work. And if that happens, then you might very well be my new CTO at some point down the road. If that’s the case, I ought to know a little more about you.”

She tore off a piece of crust from her second slice and tossed it into her mouth. After chewing and swallowing, she spoke.

“How about this?” she said. “I’ll tell you about me if you tell me a little about you. I know how secretive you are about your history, but that’s some information I think a fiancée ought to know.”

“Good point,” I said.

“So,” she said. “Why don’t we start with your childhood?”

I winced at the word.

“Is that necessary?” I asked. “I didn’t exactly have the happiest childhood in the world.”

“I guess you can tell me whatever you want to. Or not tell me anything. But it’s going to be really strange if anyone ever found out that your fiancée doesn’t know a thing about you other than what’s been in the tabloids.”

She had a point.

“How about you tell me where you’re from, for one?”

“Oregon,” I said. “Rural Oregon. Very, very rural Oregon—some town called Brennan. I was born there and given up for adoption there. And I’ve never been back.”

“Adoption?” she asked. “Then that means you’re a—”

“Foster kid,” I said. “I never knew my parents, and I’ve never wanted to. All I know about them is that my father was a drunk who left my mother as soon as she became pregnant, and my mother was a woman who evidently didn’t feel like she was up to the task of raising me.”

“I see,” said Chelsea.

“I was passed around from one state-run place to another until I was ten. By then the system had hardened me so much that the people who looked after me didn’t think I was going to ever fit in with a family, even if they even managed to find one for me.”

“But they eventually did, right?”

“They did. Steve and Barbara Carver. They took a chance on me when no one else would. I suppose they saw something in me.”

It was becoming too much to talk about. I wanted the subject to be done with.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re my real parents. And that’s all I have to say about that for now.”

My tone was sharp, and Chelsea got the message.

“And you?” I asked.

She smiled slightly. Her smile was something else, and it was beginning to have an effect on me that I didn’t quite know how to handle.

“You saw my file—you know I’m a Florida girl,” she said. “Born and raised in West Palm Beach.”

“And here in the big city to make good,” I said, already feeling relieved that subject was off me.

Besides, I was genuinely interested in learning more about Chelsea.

“That’s right,” she said. “My parents wanted me to stay in Florida, to be near the family and find some nice local guy. But I knew that wasn’t in the cards for me. Especially with what I wanted to do with tech.”

“I can get behind that,” I said. “I looked into some of the apps you’ve designed—they’re quite something. I can only imagine what you’d be capable of with the resources of a company like mine behind you.”

“Maybe something to discuss another day,” she said with a smile.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I went to school at University of California Santa Cruz, and when I graduated I got a job working for some major company in the area. I thought it was the right thing to do, to get a job and follow the rules and slowly make my way up the ladder.”

She shook her head as if recalling a bad memory.

“But all it took was a month there to know that wasn’t for me. I just didn’t fit in there. So, I put in my two weeks and got another job, thinking maybe it was the company, that I just needed to find a place that’d be a good fit for me.”

“And let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t fit in there, either.”

“Nope, and I knew it right away. I gave it my best and tried to keep a good attitude, but it just didn’t work. The bosses were great, my coworkers were great, but something about working for someone else, being a small part in building their vision—”

“And not your own vision,” I said, unable to help myself from jumping in.

Her eyes lit up in that way that seemed to make her whole face glow.

“That’s right!” she said. “I knew that I had my own vision, my own thing that I wanted to make real.”

I sat back in my plastic chair, a small smile on my face.

“It’s the entrepreneurial spirit,” I said. “Not everyone has it. Some people are content to be a small part of someone else’s dream, like you were in those companies. And there’s nothing wrong with that—the world needs visionaries and people who can help bring those visions into reality. But for those of us who are the former, there’s nothing else we can do that will make us happy.”

“That’s right,” she said, her tone suggesting she was overjoyed to be speaking with someone who felt the same way. “So, I put in a few months at that place, and while I was there I did some searching around the city for other people in the same position as me. Luckily, here in San Francisco, you have to go out of your way to not find people looking to get in on a startup.

“I met Walsh and Becca, both more suited for the networking aspects of the job than I was, and I showed them my app ideas. They loved them, and we started Illimitable.”

She looked up slightly with a pleased, dreamy expression on her face.

“And for the first couple of years, it was amazing. It started off as just the three of us, but before too long my apps started selling, and we could afford to bring more staff onto the team. We weren’t the biggest company in the world, but we were mine.”

“This is where I come into the story,” I said.

Her expression darkened slightly.

“That’s right,” she said. “Then you came in and…did what you did.”

Silence hung in the air, and I made sure to choose my next words carefully.

“If it’s any consolation,” I said finally, “I did my research. I wouldn’t have bought your company if I didn’t think it was worth its weight in gold.”

Judging by her stern expression, this didn’t do the trick.

“You took my company away from me,” she said. “Made it into exactly what I didn’t want it to be, made me be just another small part of your grand vision.” She shook her head. “And the worst part is I really only have myself to blame. If I only had actually taken the time to look over the contracts Walsh had me sign, I would’ve seen that he and Becca had the power to sell the company like they did without needing my approval.” She pushed her pizza away. “What’s done is done, I suppose.”

“But you could’ve taken the big payout and started a new company, used this all as a learning experience,” I said.

“Not a chance,” she said, not a trace of doubt in her voice. “I put so much into the company, there was no way I was going to leave it behind, even if it wasn’t mine anymore. And each member of the team was chosen by me, and just about every one of them came over to Carver—er, your company. I wasn’t about to leave them.”

As she spoke, I noticed an intensity to her, the same that I’d gotten a hint of in the elevator. It was the intensity that’d drawn me to her to begin with.

“This is your chance, though,” I said. “You’re doing great so far with this arrangement. And if you keep it up, you’ll all but have your company back.”

Chelsea’s eyes became downcast and she began slowly twisting the ring on her finger.

“I know,” she said, “but never in a million years did I ever think this would be something I’d have to do to succeed on my own terms. I always thought it was about hard work and skills and grit, not about pretending to be the fiancée of a billionaire.”

“You have to admit,” I said. “It’s pretty exciting as far as the tech world goes.”

Her eyes flicked up and she smiled slightly. “That’s one way to look at it,” she said. “But as I said, this isn’t at all how what I imagined.”