LITMIR.BIZ

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you? I’m careful about who I give a reference to, Harry. My reputation is very important to me, and I’m not going to tarnish it with Arthur Bean, but he’s more than welcome to try on his own. He can’t stay with us, however. We’ll give him two weeks to try and find another home within SoluCent. Sound good?”

      Harry nodded.

      “Tell you what else. I’ll personally put Bean in touch with my financial advisor. If anybody could get him out of debt, it’s my man Stanley.”

      “Thank you, Charlie. Folks know that you’re demanding, but it’s nice to know that you aren’t cruel.”

      Charlie laughed. “Well, Bean messed up bad. I’m sure he’ll land on his feet. Software types tend to do just that.”

      Harry thanked him again, and they went inside. As he and Monte made their way back to his office, Charlie thought about something troubling him more than Arthur Bean’s extracurricular activities. It was an e-mail he’d received from a woman named Anne Pedersen the night before. He didn’t know who Anne was. They had never spoken before, never exchanged e-mail, and never been in a meeting together. He’d looked her up in the Outlook directory and seen only that she worked in the consumer electronics marketing division. Although they were strangers, she had e-mailed him, urgently requesting that they meet for lunch. She’d refused to say what it was about, only that the fate of InVision was at stake. Whoever this Anne Pedersen was, she sure knew how to get his attention.

      With a few minutes to spare before his next meeting, Charlie decided to clean up some documents that had been on his To Do list a day longer than the date he had given himself to complete the work. Charlie opened a desk drawer and took out an old shoe he kept there. He put it on and immediately felt Monte go to work on it. Charlie smiled. He loved having Monte in the office with him, but his beagle’s chewing habits hadn’t changed much since he first brought him home. Anytime Charlie sat down, he put on the old shoe to keep his new ones from being ravaged.

      Charlie opened his laptop and was greeted by a bright yellow sticky note on the dark monitor screen. The penmanship, near perfect script, was clearly his own. Perhaps it was just the pressures from the upcoming product launch testing his nerves, or some late-night misguided attempt at crafting inspirational, team-building messages, but he couldn’t recall when he’d written it, or the reason for jotting down the cryptic affirmation. The note read simply:

      If not yourself, then who can you believe?

      Chapter 3

      If not yourself, then who can you believe?

      On a normal day Charlie could make more decisions and progress in three hours than most directors at his level could make in a week. Those decisions came to him naturally; if Charlie believed in anything, it was himself. He spent a minute trying to remember when and where he’d written that note, came up blank, then transferred it to the inside flap of his BlackBerry holder.

      Recall was his strength, a gift for names, faces, and events that had served him well as his product’s ambassador. But with all that was going on at SoluCent, he wasn’t overly concerned. His meeting with Anne Pedersen was nearing, and he had little time or patience to think of much else.

      Monte eventually stopped gnawing on his shoe. Charlie listened a moment, until he heard quiet snoring coming from underneath the desk. He found it comforting. Charlie made sure to change his footwear, having once forgotten to take off Monte’s chew shoe before a meeting with Yardley. He rarely made such thoughtless errors, and certainly never the same one twice. Next, he made a halfhearted attempt to answer e-mail. Most of it was a waste of time to begin with, but today was especially bleak. He shut down Outlook, grabbed a container of Lysol disinfectant wipes, and began to clean around his desk.

      Charlie’s office was noticeably sparse. Some had commented that they thought it was empty or occupied by a contractor. Those who found Charlie’s militant commitment to office cleanliness excessive did not know how he had grown up, otherwise, they would have understood.

      His childhood had been chaotic, unpredictable, and far from perfect. Charlie was determined that his future would not compare to the past. As part of that commitment, everything in his life had to have order. For Charlie, order equaled control and control was his secret ingredient for success. But he knew his methods came at a price—the most obvious being his failed relationship with Gwen. Thinking back on how much more relaxed he’d become since bringing Monte home, it was hard to believe Gwen and he lasted as long as they did.

      If one thing hadn’t changed, though, it was his opinion of people who were out of control; those who could not place their hands on a file within seconds of a request were no closer to ascending the tops of the professional ranks than the interns still in college. As a result, he kept his office clean and tidy with religious dedication—there were no manila file folders tossed about, no pens, coffee cups, or desk toys of any kind.

      While most professionals at SoluCent reminded themselves that real life existed outside the cubicle or office walls by adorning their desks with framed pictures of family, Charlie had none. He had dated a few times since moving back east, but instead of a blossoming romance, he’d found distraction and drama. A relationship wasn’t out of the question, but it wasn’t a priority, either. InVision was. Still, it wasn’t all work. His life had been here before moving to California. There were friends he saw on occasion, though less frequently as product development heated up. He made a much more conscious effort to stay in touch with his mother, who lived a few towns away from his Boston apartment. She was delighted to finally have “her boy” and “granddog” back from the West Coast, and they made it a point to have dinner together at least twice a month. He preferred they go out, as visits to her house were purposefully short and always tense. Monte, however, greatly enjoyed going there, but more to harass the neighbor’s poodle than for the change of scenery.

      His mother still lived in the same forsaken multifamily house where Charlie grew up, in a not-so-nice section of Waltham. Charlie wasn’t one for grandiose gestures, nor did he easily part with his hard-earned money, but the sight of that house on that decrepit, drug-trafficked street was stomach churning. No matter how much he’d insisted, though, Charlie’s mother would not accept his offer to buy her a new house. For the past several years his brother, Joe, had been immersed in an experimental, intensive cognitive therapy program at Walderman Hospital in Belmont. Charlie’s mother had voiced concern that moving to a new house would upset Joe’s treatment and result in a setback, thus prompting her to decline the generous offer. That didn’t surprise Charlie in the least. His mother’s life had for years revolved around Joe.

      Despite the five-year gap in age, Charlie had once felt close to his older brother. Joe’s adolescence had arrived the same year their father left and things changed for the worse. He’d often been moody and quick to anger. Joe would spend hours listening to their father’s favorite jazz albums in what Charlie described to friends as a deep trance. Sometimes Joe would disappear for days on end, with no memory of being gone, and while at home, his severe temper flare-ups worsened, prompting their mother to seek medical help. Months later doctors had diagnosed Joe with and treated him for a rare epileptic condition. A boy in Charlie’s school had had a seizure once, and so Charlie had asked his mother about it.

      “Why doesn’t Joe shake?”

      “There are different types of seizures,” his mother had explained.

      “Is Joe going to die?”

      “No.”

      That had been good enough for Charlie. He’d been eight years old at the time.

      For a while life in the Giles household returned to normal, albeit without their father around. Then Joe turned eighteen, and that year he was diagnosed with an entirely different ailment—the same one their father also suffered from—schizophrenia. Turmoil and heartache became the norm for the Giles family once again. It stayed that way even after Charlie left home to attend college, even during his years out West. It was a blessing the day Joe found the Walderman program. At last life in that beat-up old house in Waltham started to get better.

      Since

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