incompetent.”
“I didn’t know your dad lost control of the company,” I say, making a mental note of this as well. Henry was going to fall out when he got my edits, and I hadn’t even gotten to Ness yet. But Ness was doing the impossible: convincing me to shelve one story while revising another.
“The board didn’t take the company away from him for long. My dad had been working on his TideGen program for almost a decade by that point, all in secret. It was a personal project. He paid for it out of his own pocket—”
“I’d heard that part.”
“Yeah, it became part of his legend, that he privately financed the oil company’s first green initiative. As everyone knows by now, the whole thing was bullshit. When he couldn’t get the program to work, he turned it into a PR move. Used it for deflection. What’s interesting is when he gave the speech that turned the stock around, he technically wasn’t CEO of anything at that point. The board was waiting until close of markets on Friday to announce, just so they could handle the spin. They were scrambling that same week to name a replacement. Meanwhile, my father was about to shock the world and rescue the company.”
Ness leans forward and places his hands on his knees. He looks at me for a long pause, a half-smile on his lips. The most distracting thing about this man isn’t his handsomeness, but his confidence. It isn’t fair for any human to visibly worry so little.
“Can I show you the video?” he asks.
“I’ve seen it,” I tell him.
“I want to show you something interesting.”
“Is there any way I can verify this?” I ask. “That your father wasn’t CEO at the time of the speech?”
“Let me show you the video,” Ness insists. “You like personal details. I want to show you how my parents met.”
He gets up and disappears down the hall. I take a sip of coffee and count the time between sweeps of light. Twelve seconds, not ten. If I had a chart of the Maine coast, I could find the lighthouse based on its period. I’m thinking of my father and all he taught me when Ness returns with a tablet.
He sits down on the sofa beside me. I try to slide over, but the armrest has me pinned. His knee presses against mine. Maybe he isn’t aware of this. He calmly starts the video, and I feel a flush of heat from too much wine or the coffee or from him sitting too close. On the tablet, his father is giving a press conference on the deck of an oil platform, and all I can think is that this man—who I have been chasing down for two years—is now far too close. I’ve been trying to pin him down, and now he has me pinned. I’m overreacting, I tell myself. I feel like standing up and running away from here, but some tiny voice says this is irrational, to calm the fuck down.
“Listen,” Ness says, turning up the volume. He has fast-forwarded past the start of his father’s speech. I’ve seen this before. I try to concentrate on what’s happening on that screen, not in the room. The speech occurred a few years before I was born, but every journalist has seen it. Nathaniel Wilde is standing on that symbol of ecological disaster, that oil platform, announcing that it was one of fourteen that drew its own power not by burning the oil it pumped but by the swell of the sea. And now was the time to announce Ocean Oil’s plan to wean itself off oil altogether and that the future of tomorrow’s energy needs would be a mix of geothermal and the incessant wave energy of the ocean tides.
“Here,” Ness says, pointing at the video. The camera has turned to a group of reporters sitting on folding chairs arranged across the deck of the rig. A woman is holding a pen up in the air, rises to ask a question. “Tara Brighton, UK Daily ,” she says. “You don’t really expect us to believe that Ocean Oil is going green, do you?”
The camera cuts back to Ness’s father. But Ness rewinds the video again. When the camera shifts to the reporter, he
“I didn’t know your dad lost control of the company,” I say, making a mental note of this as well. Henry was going to fall out when he got my edits, and I hadn’t even gotten to Ness yet. But Ness was doing the impossible: convincing me to shelve one story while revising another.
“The board didn’t take the company away from him for long. My dad had been working on his TideGen program for almost a decade by that point, all in secret. It was a personal project. He paid for it out of his own pocket—”
“I’d heard that part.”
“Yeah, it became part of his legend, that he privately financed the oil company’s first green initiative. As everyone knows by now, the whole thing was bullshit. When he couldn’t get the program to work, he turned it into a PR move. Used it for deflection. What’s interesting is when he gave the speech that turned the stock around, he technically wasn’t CEO of anything at that point. The board was waiting until close of markets on Friday to announce, just so they could handle the spin. They were scrambling that same week to name a replacement. Meanwhile, my father was about to shock the world and rescue the company.”
Ness leans forward and places his hands on his knees. He looks at me for a long pause, a half-smile on his lips. The most distracting thing about this man isn’t his handsomeness, but his confidence. It isn’t fair for any human to visibly worry so little.
“Can I show you the video?” he asks.
“I’ve seen it,” I tell him.
“I want to show you something interesting.”
“Is there any way I can verify this?” I ask. “That your father wasn’t CEO at the time of the speech?”
“Let me show you the video,” Ness insists. “You like personal details. I want to show you how my parents met.”
He gets up and disappears down the hall. I take a sip of coffee and count the time between sweeps of light. Twelve seconds, not ten. If I had a chart of the Maine coast, I could find the lighthouse based on its period. I’m thinking of my father and all he taught me when Ness returns with a tablet.
He sits down on the sofa beside me. I try to slide over, but the armrest has me pinned. His knee presses against mine. Maybe he isn’t aware of this. He calmly starts the video, and I feel a flush of heat from too much wine or the coffee or from him sitting too close. On the tablet, his father is giving a press conference on the deck of an oil platform, and all I can think is that this man—who I have been chasing down for two years—is now far too close. I’ve been trying to pin him down, and now he has me pinned. I’m overreacting, I tell myself. I feel like standing up and running away from here, but some tiny voice says this is irrational, to calm the fuck down.
“Listen,” Ness says, turning up the volume. He has fast-forwarded past the start of his father’s speech. I’ve seen this before. I try to concentrate on what’s happening on that screen, not in the room. The speech occurred a few years before I was born, but every journalist has seen it. Nathaniel Wilde is standing on that symbol of ecological disaster, that oil platform, announcing that it was one of fourteen that drew its own power not by burning the oil it pumped but by the swell of the sea. And now was the time to announce Ocean Oil’s plan to wean itself off oil altogether and that the future of tomorrow’s energy needs would be a mix of geothermal and the incessant wave energy of the ocean tides.
“Here,” Ness says, pointing at the video. The camera has turned to a group of reporters sitting on folding chairs arranged across the deck of the rig. A woman is holding a pen up in the air, rises to ask a question. “Tara Brighton, UK Daily ,” she says. “You don’t really expect us to believe that Ocean Oil is going green, do you?”
The camera cuts back to Ness’s father. But Ness rewinds the video again. When the camera shifts to the reporter, he
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