She had been twenty-eight, sitting alone in the back corner of the space with two monitors open and a legal pad filled edge to edge with process diagrams. He noticed her because she was beautiful, though not in the loud way the city rewarded. She wore dark clothes, little jewelry, and the concentrated stillness of someone who was far more interested in the work in front of her than in being noticed while doing it.
He approached her with a joke about bad coffee.
She did not laugh at first. Then she did, but only because his timing was unexpectedly precise.
He asked what she was building.
She told him in clipped, careful language that she was solving a systems problem in predictive infrastructure management, and his eyes lit up the way men’s eyes do when they sense not just brilliance but usable brilliance.
Julian had always known how to borrow shine. In college he had dated women whose essays improved after meeting him. In his first job he attached himself to older executives and repeated their insights as though he had generated them spontaneously. None of this made him stupid. It made him opportunistic, which is more common and often more dangerous.