The Term Sheet in the Data Room

Julian Crowe asked me in the hallway outside Finance at 4:47 on a Friday.

He held a cold Americano and last week's visitor badge still clipped to his jacket. The fluorescent light over the copier flickered the way it had since March.

"Napa," he said. "Northbridge is coming. Two nights. I need someone who looks like she belongs at dinner."

I was an FP&A analyst at Helix Freight. I belonged at a laptop.

"I'm not your girlfriend," I said.

"I'm not asking you to be one. I'm asking you to play one."

"No."

He smiled as if I had quoted a price he could raise. "Think about it over the weekend."

I went home to a studio in Hayes Valley. My cat, Miso, needed insulin at eight. I heated leftover udon, washed the same blue bowl, and closed the unit-economics file I had rebuilt twice that afternoon.

I did not think about Napa.

Monday at 7:12 a.m., an email arrived on my personal Gmail.

From: Helen Voss, Northbridge Capital. Subject: UnitEcon_v4.

She had last year's Series C data room. Sheet three still carried my named range and a comment I had left in yellow: do not annualize February; warehouse overtime is seasonal.

She wanted a call before the vineyard lunch.

I sat on the edge of my bed in yesterday's socks and read the message twice.

Helen Voss did not need a girlfriend. She needed the person who had built the model Julian had presented as his.

At 8:03 I forwarded the email to my work address and walked into the office. Julian was already in Conference Room B with a term sheet printed on cream paper. His chief of staff looked at me as if I had arrived early for a costume fitting.

"Helen asked for you," Julian said. He sounded almost annoyed that the request had not gone through him.

"She asked for the model," I said.

"The model is the company."

"The comments are mine."

He set down his pen. "Come to Napa as an analyst. Sit in the diligence room. Don't perform."

That was a different ask. I said I would go if my title on the attendee list was accurate and if I received the current term sheet, not last year's.

He sent both before noon.

The vineyard was in St. Helena, a low stone building with a gravel lot that dusted my black shoes. I arrived Saturday at 10:40 in a rideshare that smelled of citrus cleaner. Helen was already in the converted tasting room they were using as a data room: folding tables, power strips, a printer that jammed on page two.

She was sixty-one, gray at the temples, wearing a navy sweater with a coffee stain she had not bothered to hide.

"Nora Hale," she said. "Walk me through working capital."

We spent two hours on receivables aging and the warehouse overtime I had flagged. Julian came in at 1:15 with lunch: grilled chicken, too much lemon, plastic forks. He hovered.

Helen did not look at him until she finished a question about customer concentration.

"Julian, I need forty minutes without the narrative."

He left. The door clicked. Someone in the kitchen dropped a tray.

"He asked you to play girlfriend," Helen said, not as a question.

"I declined."

"Good. I found your comments because our associate exported the workbook instead of the PDF he circulated. The PDF had his name on the cover."

"That's standard."

"Standard is also how bad models hide." She turned her laptop. The term sheet showed a forty-million-dollar primary at a two-hundred-eighty-million pre-money, with a participating preferred that would punish a modest exit. "Did you build this valuation?"

"I built the operating model. Banking built the deck. I didn't see the participating language until this morning."

Helen nodded once, the way auditors nod.

"I'm not here to dress the round," I said. "I'm here because you emailed me."

"I emailed you because I may lead, and I don't lead on a black box." She paused. "After this weekend, if I invest, I will want an operating cadence. Monthly actuals versus the model, with the person who can explain the variance in the room. That can be you at Helix, or you on a contract to Northbridge. I don't poach on a handshake. I do ask whether you have thought about it."

I had not. I thought about Miso's insulin, my rent, and the fact that Julian had tried to borrow my face before he offered my work.

"I'll think in writing," I said.