The offer came in at two minutes past seven on a Monday morning and Simone Adeyemi read it standing up in her own kitchen with her coat already on.
She had been going out. That is the detail she has never been able to get past: that she had her keys in her hand and one arm in a coat and was going to walk to the river and back before the seven-thirty, and instead she stood in a kitchen in Peckham for eleven minutes and did not move at all.
Strictly private and confidential.
Dear Ms Adeyemi,
I am writing on behalf of Halborn Group plc to make an indicative proposal for the entire issued share capital of Anansi Technologies Limited.
Two hundred and forty million pounds.
She read the number four times, which everybody does, and then made herself go back and read the rest of it, because the number is the part they want you to look at.
Cash. No financing condition. Eleven days of confirmatory diligence and signing by the end of November.
Clause eleven said that the board of Halborn had approved the approach on the ninth.
Clause fourteen said they reserved the right to make the approach public if the board of Anansi declined to engage, which is a sentence that means one thing and is always written in a way that suggests it means nothing.
She founded that company at twenty-two out of a bedroom in a flat on Rye Lane with four thousand pounds and a laptop that belonged to her sister.
There are three hundred and eleven people in it now.
It pays four hundred thousand shift workers on the day they do the work — care assistants, cleaners, warehouse pickers, hospital bank staff — instead of three weeks later, which is what everybody else does and what the entire sector has always done, and it has never once in six years made a profit.
She has thirty-one per cent. That is enough to be listened to and it is not enough to say no.
She got to the bottom of page four.
I would welcome the opportunity to meet in person at your convenience.
Yours sincerely,
A. Novak
Chief Executive Officer
Simone Adeyemi read that signature block, and then read it again, and then put the phone face down on the counter and stood in her kitchen with her coat on for about ninety seconds.
Then she picked it up and typed the name into a search engine, which she had been avoiding doing for two years without ever once admitting to herself that it was avoidance, because she had never had a surname to type.
The first result had a photograph on it.
He is thirty-three. He has run Halborn since 2029. He has a jaw and a good coat and the specific, exhausted, entirely blank expression of a man being photographed at a conference.
And two years earlier, in the March, in a bar on the Mainzer Landstrasse in Frankfurt, he had sat on a stool eleven inches away from her from midnight until four in the morning, and neither of them had asked the other's surname, and that had been her idea.