She would walk through the glass doors wearing one of her carefully chosen, fashionably casual work ensembles, and look around the high-ceilinged, brick-walled interior of Stake Inc., and sigh with satisfaction. Only inwardly, of course; if you wanted to fit in at Stake, Clare had realized early on, you had to behave as if you thought you were really just a little bit too good to be working there. It was an attitude she didn’t find hard to cultivate. On that particular morning, though, she was having trouble. She sat in her car, scrolling through the list of locations on her phone, wondering whether she was good enough. You never got very many instructions at Stake, but even for them, this was a little thin. “Use your instincts,” Seevers had told her. “Consult the software, but don’t rely on it. When in doubt, go with your gut.” Which sounded like it might be an ass-covering way of saying that the software wasn’t any good. He had sat on the edge of her desk and waxed poetic about getting back to the basics, pounding the pavement, diversifying core offerings.
