Daniel's inspection of the BMW required three passes and about four uninterrupted minutes of commentary.
He'd been waiting outside Maxwell's building at 46, his feet tapping against the cold ground inside his North Face jacket, and when Maxwell pulled out of the parking lot and stopped on the sidewalk, Daniel stood still for a moment, looking at the car with the expression of someone who'd just finished reviewing a document he thought he'd completed.
He got in. He ran his hand over the dashboard.
"Good," he said. "Good." He looked at the back seat. He looked at the center console. He touched the seat stitching with two fingers, as if to check that it was genuine. "Maxwell. Dude. How bad are you doing right now? Give me a number. Because this is a..."
"I'm doing fine financially."
"That's not a number."
"I know that."
"You always answer a different question than the one I asked."
"There's going to be a lot of traffic in Michigan. I'm going to Lake Shore."
Daniel glanced at him for a moment with that particular expression he wore when he decided to put something off and then pick it up again with a vengeance. "Lake Shore is good," he said. "But we're not done yet."
They weren't done. Daniel brought the subject up again near the Fullerton exit, unprompted, in the middle of a completely different conversation. "You know what I keep coming back to?" he said.
"No."
"You've been parked in that spot for two years, two years, Max."
"The spot came with the lease."
"I know the spot came with the..." He stopped. He laughed, something he found inside, a genuine laugh, tilting his head back. "You know what, that's so typical, I don't even react. It's the most Maxwell thing I've ever heard."
"Thanks."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know."
" The lake loomed majestically to his left: dark and vast, barely distinguishable from the sky except for the way the city lights reflected on its surface. Daniel was silent for a minute, which was significant to him. He looked out the passenger window.
"Is Reinhardt's bill going well?" he asked, though he really meant something else.
"Pretty well."
"Is Hartwell treating you well?"
Maxwell knew how to respond. "He treats me like he treats a resource he isn't fully responsible for."
Daniel looked away from the window. "English."
"He takes credit for the things I build and considers that a reasonable deal."
"That's…" Daniel grimaced. "Why do you put up with it?"
"Because I'm building something he can't yet take credit for."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm in no hurry." Daniel stared at him for a long moment. The United Center was in sight, lit up and surrounded by the typical bustle of a Friday home game: people moving in single file from the parking lots, the distant sound of something that might have been music piercing the cold air. "You're the most patient person I've ever met," Daniel finally said, and he didn't say it with admiration, exactly; he said it as if it bothered him a little. "I don't know if that's a superpower or a disorder."
"Maybe both."
"Maybe both," Daniel repeated, with the tone of someone pretending to be satisfied with an answer that he isn't.
The Bulls lost to the Miami Heat by five points.
It wasn't even the score that enraged the crowd. It was how the game unfolded. The Bulls played well; for a good stretch, they played the way Tom Thibodeau wanted: suffocating on defense, intentional on offense, with Derrick Rose finding gaps where there weren't any and exploiting them cleanly. But the Heat were superior in the final six minutes. LeBron James scored nine points in those six minutes with the peculiar efficiency of a man solving a math problem he finds mildly interesting, and the United Center, 22,000 people who desperately wanted to believe in a different outcome, grasped the truth around the three-minute mark and were swept up in the peculiar frenzy of a crowd that can't see it and can't look away.
"No," Daniel said when he finished, standing, his jacket already on. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Me neither."
"Okay. Because I'm not emotionally ready." He gestured toward the court without looking at it. "That guy over there, LeBron James, doesn't have to be that good. He doesn't need to be. It's overhyped."
Maxwell glanced toward the courtroom, where James was talking with Wade, both relaxed and unhurried, like people for whom the outcome hadn't been in doubt. "He let the shot go by twice in the fourth quarter when he could have taken it."
"I know. That's worse, in a way."
"Create the margin where you need it. Not where it looks good."
"Maxwell. I'm grieving. Can't you do the analysis right now?"
They made their way through the crowd at the United Center and back to the BMW. Inside, with the doors closed to keep out the cold, Daniel sat with his arms crossed, staring out the windshield. "It's okay," he said finally. "It's okay. I'm fine. I'm an adult. Let's go."
Maxwell left the building and headed toward Lake Shore. The post-game traffic was the typical breathing pause of fifteen thousand people trying to make left turns, and Maxwell navigated it with the patience of someone who desperately knew he had nowhere else to go.
"Can I ask you something about work?" Daniel said.
"Sure."
"What bothers you the most?"
Maxwell looked at him. "The capitalization table. It's a spreadsheet that tracks a company's ownership: who owns what percentage of the stock, what it's worth according to different valuations."
"Okay." Daniel was silent for a moment. "Gradient is considering a Series A funding round. They've mentioned stock packages as part of the compensation. That's why I haven't pushed the salary issue as much; they keep saying, 'Think about the stock.'"
"What are your defenses?"
"My what?"
"Your stock acquisition timeline. How long until the stock is actually yours?"
"I..." Daniel stopped. His jaw shifted slightly, a sign that someone was recalculating. "They said four years."
"With a cliff edge?"
"What?"
Maxwell paused. Not intentionally, not to emphasize anything; he just needed a second to find the right starting point. "Okay. There are two ways to look at a startup's stock. The first is what they tell you it's worth, which is based on the current valuation and sounds great because Series A valuations are always optimistic. The second is what you can get, which depends on the stage, the price, the company, and how much your original percentage has been diluted by then." He glanced around. "What percentage were you offered?"
"Like, 0.8."
"Of what appreciation?"
"They said the company is now worth twelve million."
"So, in today's terms, that's about ninety-six thousand dollars on paper."
Daniel nodded slowly. "Which is what they kept saying. That's real money."
"Is that what they kept saying?" "It could be. If the company reaches an exit of twelve million or more, which statistically..." He trailed off. "What are its revenues?"
"I really don't know."
"Did you draft the equity participation agreement?"
"I have an email."
Maxwell nodded once. He decided how much to say and how much to ask. Daniel was his best friend, also twenty-five, and smart enough to be angry with himself for not asking those questions sooner, which meant that how the next thirty seconds unfolded would determine whether the conversation helped him or made him feel worse. "Get the participation agreement in a formal document, not just an email," he said. "That way, I can read it and tell you what you have. Right now, we're working with incomplete information."
"Would you do that?"
"You're asking me if I'd read you a document."
"I mean… yes. It's a working document."
"Daniel. Yes. Send it to me."
Daniel took a deep breath. Something lifted from him: the release of a tension he'd held for so long it felt like a pose. "Okay. Yes. I'll send it to you this weekend." He glanced out the passenger window. The lake slipped past his eyes, black and textured, the last vestige of the city's east side before nightfall. "I feel like an idiot for not knowing this."
"You know how to run a marketing campaign for six different product lines at once. You know things I don't."
"That's different."
"It's different in subject matter. Not complexity." He let that sink in. Then: "Stop making that 'my lack of knowledge is a character flaw' thing."
Daniel was silent for a moment. "When you get wise, man."
"I've always been like this. You just get distracted by the BMW."
Daniel laughed, a loud, sudden laugh, a real laugh, the kind that filled the car and meant he was going to relax. "Okay," he said. "Fair enough." He looked at the dashboard again. "But it's a good car, really."
"Yeah," Maxwell said. "It is."
They drove back along the lake. The city settled around them in the particular way Chicago does on a cold Friday night: brightly lit, vibrant, and indifferent to the circumstances of a single person. Daniel spent the remaining twelve minutes talking about the Bulls' playoff chances, about a girl he'd had lunch with twice, Andrea, who worked in user experience design and had opinions on brands that she found either impressive or irritating depending on the day, and about a podcast he'd started listening to about economic history.
Maxwell listened. He asked two questions and gave three answers. He drove.
He dropped Daniel off at his building in North Paulina. Daniel got out of the car and then leaned back before closing the door, holding the roof, looking at Maxwell with the look he reserved for things he was sincere about. "Hi," he said. "Everything okay? Actually."
Maxwell looked at him. "Yeah."
"Very different or strangely different?"
Maxwell thought of Marissa at the reception desk. Of his mother on the phone. Of his father's hand sliding across the door panel. He said, "I'm still not sure."
Daniel nodded as if it were a reasonable answer. "Okay," he said. "Call me this weekend."
"I will."
He closed the door. Maxwell watched him walk into the building before starting the engine. He drove home on the side streets instead of the freeway, for no particular reason, just the longer route, the usual, well-lit road through town on a Friday night.
The system interface waited at the edge of his vision, off and patient.
He didn't open it.