Early November, New York, NY

Diane wiped her hands nervously down the side of her pencil-cut charcoal-grey striped wool skirt.  She pushed open Mark’s smoked-out glass door, clutching her iPad to her side, absentmindedly tucked her hair behind her ear as she straightened her spine and pulled her shoulders sharply back, mimicking the time she’d been a ballerina during her early teens, about to step on stage to dance her solo in a Washington-area production of the “Nutcracker.”

But Diane was no longer a teenage ballerina, nor an MIT-then-Harvard graduate school wunderkind.  As she let the smoked-glass door swoosh shut behind her, she reminded herself that she was back to being a finance executive with a promising career despite her humiliating and public collapse during a client meeting in her prior firm two months ago.  Thanks to the continued belief of a few people in her, she’d been reintroduced into the world of New York finance.

In the wake of her inexplicable collapse and sudden pull-out from New York people had whispered she’d suffered from “nerves or exhaustion” and that she couldn’t handle the high-stakes, pressure-cooker world of New York finance. Although she was just in her mid twenties, at that time she’d thought her Wall Street career was over just when she was rising quickly.  Guess what?  The sky didn’t fall on me, chicken littles.  And I am gunning for the top.

Mark turned his chair around from behind his desk to face her, motioning with one of his massive offensive-lineman’s hands for her to take a seat in front of his desk, while he thumbed his meaty fingers over the glass screen of his tablet, appearing to be quickly scrolling over his weekly calendar.  As she took a seat in front of Mark’s steel-and-glass table her determination to prove those who believed in her were right steadied the butterflies in her stomach.

He was asking to speak to someone in his stadium-size baritone, and Diane noticed his speaker phone was lit.  Even if he’d spoken from the other side of the room to the phone’s handset instead of to the speakerphone, whoever he was talking to would have heard him anyway, Diane thought, swallowing a smile.

Mark King was the head of a boutique investment firm that had converted itself into a merchant bank a year ago, focused only on a handful of clients in selected sectors, providing them corporate finance advice, and in some cases invested its own funds in financial deals their clients undertook.  He’d hired her at the recommendation of George, the founder of the firm, and Bette, his key adviser, who was an adviser of Mark’s, as well.