CHAPTER 1
Thirty-Six Hours
Dean Kessler hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, and the apartment had started to smell like it — burnt coffee gone cold in the pot, the specific staleness of cardboard pizza boxes stacked higher than the legal correspondence they were currently losing to.
The correspondence was winning. Legal correspondence generally does.
Frank Duboise stood by the window with his arms crossed, looking at Dean the way you look at a fire you’ve already decided you can’t put out.
“It’s over,” Frank said.
“No.”
“Dean.”
“It’s not over until somebody tells me why,” Dean said, not looking up from the laptop, where a settlement number sat on the screen like a diagnosis. “Not a lawyer. Not a letter. Somebody. A person. Looking me in the eye.”
“The letter is the person looking you in the eye. That’s what a letter from four law firms means. It means they already know they’ve won and they don’t need to send a person.”
Dean closed the laptop. In the sudden quiet, the refrigerator hummed and somewhere down the hall a neighbor’s television laughed at something on a five-second delay.
“I built something forty thousand people used,” Dean said.
“You built something forty thousand people used to steal music, and now four record labels are going to own everything we have, plus some things we don’t, for the next decade,” Frank said. “That’s not a technicality, man. That’s the whole company. That’s my rent.”
Dean didn’t answer. He was doing the thing he always did when a problem got too big to hold — breaking it into smaller problems, the way he’d once broken a remote-control car into fourteen gears on a strip of concrete, on the theory that anything with enough pieces laid out in front of you eventually tells you how to put it back together.
He just hadn’t yet figured out how to do that with a company. Or, it would turn out, with several more after it, and several people along the way who deserved a version of him that had already learned this lesson instead of one still learning it in real time, at their expense.
“I need to call my mother,” Dean said, which was not, on its face, related to anything Frank had just said, and which Frank had long since stopped being surprised by.
Nobody in that apartment that night — not Dean, not Frank, not the lawyers three time zones away already drafting the next letter — had any idea they were standing at the beginning of something. They just thought the company was dying. Which, to be fair, it was.
To understand how a twenty-year-old ends up here, at two in the morning, arguing with a stack of legal paper about the meaning of the word over, you have to go back thirteen years. To a backyard. A sprinkler. And a very small boy who had just taken a screwdriver to something that, by every reasonable account, had not needed one.
