Chapter 1
Item Four
Andy Daryani had a window seat and a legal pad he had not written on since Aspen. The family office would put fifty million into Fund IV if the firm cleared their diligence team, and the diligence team wanted a data room by the fifteenth. He had agreed to that over dinner, and he had meant it.
Somewhere over Amarillo he started the list. He wrote down twelve years of IC memos and the Fund II waterfall, the version with the reserve amendment. Then he reached item four. Item four lived in Scott’s head, and Scott was fishing in Cabo until Thursday.
He had written item three without looking up: the Fund III side letters. Those lived in Beth Ann’s files, beside her running summary of what each LP had been promised, in a system of folders and colored tabs that nobody else at the firm had ever learned, and Beth Ann could put her hand on any one of them while you were still asking for it. Item three was a morning’s work.
Item four was the Charlotte holdback. When the firm refinanced one of the Fund II properties in Charlotte in 2024, Scott had negotiated an earnout with the new lender: the lender held back part of the loan proceeds at closing and would fund them once the renovated property’s rent roll showed trailing occupancy at a level the two of them had agreed, and the cash would flow out to distributions and through the Fund II promote. The terms of the test lived in Scott’s email, and Andy had seen them once, on Scott’s screen, with no idea what folder they were in, or whether Scott had ever put them in a folder at all.
He looked at the four lines for a while. Then he went back and wrote a name beside each one. Tom went beside the waterfall and Beth Ann beside the side letters. Scott went beside the holdback. Beside the IC memos, after a moment, he wrote his own initials.
The flight attendant came through with the cart. Andy took a second coffee he did not need and set it on the tray next to the pad, and the plane bumped once over the Panhandle and settled again.
The dinner had been at Walt Ostrander’s house, high on the slope above the Roaring Fork, where the windows ran from the floor to the beams and the first snow of the year already sat on the high peaks across the valley. Walt was in his early seventies. He had made his money in industrial distribution, the pipe, valves and fittings that go inside other people’s factories, and he still talked about it with plain affection. He grilled the elk himself, in a fleece vest, and let his CIO do the talking.
Russ Whitlow did it well. He knew Fund IV as well as some of Andy’s own LPs did: two sixty at first close in June, five hundred million as the target, about twenty assets across the first three funds and the old syndications, seven acquisition closes a year. He knew the firm had stayed with value-add apartments in the same Sun Belt markets since the spare-bedroom days, and he said so as a compliment. He asked about the renovation premiums on the older garden deals in Raleigh and Nashville, and how the firm was thinking about rates. Andy answered from memory and watched Russ nod in the right places.
Travis Oyler sat at the far end and said almost nothing all night. He ran operational due diligence for the Ostrander office, a lean, quiet man who ate slowly and listened with his head tilted a little to one side. Once, while Walt was carving, he asked a single question.
“Who reconciles the waterfall?”
“Our controller,” Andy said. “Tom Langford.”
Travis nodded and went back to his elk.
Over dessert, when the plates had been cleared and the coffee poured, Walt set down his fork.
“Here’s where we are,” he said. “Russ likes the deals. I like you.” He folded his napkin once. “The Ostrander office will put fifty million into Fund IV as your anchor, if Travis’s team clears you. They’ll want a data room by the fifteenth of October.”
“We can do that,” Andy said.
“I thought you’d say so.” Walt looked down the table. “Travis?”
Travis smiled for the first time that evening and nodded.
Later, on the deck, with the valley gone dark below them and the smoke from the grill drifting up past the lights, Walt asked him how he had come to Texas.
“I grew up in Bombay, on Marine Drive,” Andy said. “My father worked for other Sindhi families’ trading houses for years, in Durban, in Jakarta, in Kobe. Then he came home and opened a shop of his own, and what he made paid for UT.”
Walt thought about that. “So he moved other men’s goods before he moved his own.”
“For a long time.”
“That’s distribution,” Walt said, as if it settled something. “That’s my business.”
He shook Walt’s hand at the door and walked down the drive to the car in the cold.
The plane came into Austin a little after nine. He drove home with the pad on the passenger seat, and when he let himself in, the kitchen light was on and the rest of the house was quiet. Maya was already asleep. Diya’s backpack sat by the stairs where it always sat on Sunday nights, packed and zipped, a habit she had picked up from her mother.
He poured two fingers of bourbon and took it out to the patio, which was what he did on Sunday nights when the week ahead mattered. The air had finally cooled. He read the four lines again under the porch light. Twelve years of IC memos. He tried to picture where they were and saw binders, then email, then a shared drive with the same memo saved in three places under three names. The first one had been typed by Greg at a card table in the spare bedroom where the two of them started the firm, with Andy reading over his shoulder and arguing about rent growth. That one, at least, he knew was in a binder.
He added a fifth item, and a sixth, and then he stopped writing and just looked at item four.
After a while he capped the pen, carried the glass inside, rinsed it, and turned off the kitchen light.
Monday he pulled into the back lot at 7:15. The building was two stories of pale limestone off 620 in Bee Cave, about eight thousand square feet, with a back lot that looked west toward the hills. Tom Langford’s car was already there. Tom was in by seven most days and had been for as long as Andy could remember.
Before he took the stairs he stopped in the files room, just inside the back door.
It was the one room in the building that still looked like the firm’s first years. Steel shelving, a label maker nobody had touched since 2019, and a long row of three-ring binders from the syndication days, one for each deal, the spines lettered in Greg’s square capitals. Each binder held the IC memo for its deal, the broker package, the purchase agreement, and whatever Greg had thought worth keeping. Andy ran a finger along the spines. They went through 2018. Then the shelf simply ended, because in 2019 they had raised Fund I and stopped printing things, and the memos after that lived wherever the person who wrote them had saved them.
He stood there longer than he meant to. Then he climbed the stairs.
The upstairs floor was one long open room with his glass-walled office at the far end. Just off the landing he passed Greg’s old office. They used it for storage now: boxes of old offering books, a spare monitor, two chairs with the plastic still on the legs. The nameplate on the door still read Greg Diamandis. Greg still owned fifteen percent of the firm and was still on the GP entities for the first three funds, and he had been off the payroll for years. These days he was a name on a signature page and a voice on the quarterly calls. Andy had wondered now and then what a stranger would pay Greg for that fifteen percent, and he had never once tried to price it.
Tom was at his desk with his coat on the back of his chair and a spreadsheet open across both screens. Andy recognized it from the tab colors. The Fund II promote.
“Is that the version with the reserve amendment?”
Tom kept his eyes on the screen. “It’s the only version that’s right.” Then he looked up, and his face did the thing it did when he was about to be funny about something that had stopped being funny a long time ago. “You want to hear about the waterfall?”
Andy did, for once, and Tom told him. Since the administrator had moved the funds onto its new system, its waterfall module no longer matched the LPA’s distribution provisions. So every quarter Tom rebuilt the Fund II promote by hand: sixteen tabs, four tiers, the catch-up, the clawback reserves. Then he spent the back half of his close finding the difference between his answer and the administrator’s. The difference was always in the same few places.
“Somebody asked me this weekend who reconciles it,” Andy said.
“What’d you tell them?”
“You.”
Tom thought about that for a second. “Well,” he said, “that’s true,” and went back to tab eleven.
Andy walked the length of the floor to his office and left the overhead light off. From the glass wall he could see the whole room, from the front windows to the printer in the back corner. He sat down and opened his email. A broker wanted to know whether the firm would look at a deal in Durham. Arturo had sent a roof bid from San Antonio that was over the amount he could approve on his own, and Beth Ann had a note asking which of the Fund III families should hear first about co-invest in Fund IV. None of it was hard, and all of it would sit there until he answered.
Nadia Farooq came up the stairs at 7:40 with a coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other. She had been with the firm fourteen months, and every morning Andy could remember she had been in before eight. She lit both monitors before she took her jacket off. She wrote something in the notebook, by hand, and then she started typing.
At ten past eight Maggie Holt came up the stairs, looked at him through the glass, and came down the floor to his door. In seven years at the firm she had always sat down before anyone asked. She sat.
“How was Aspen?”
“They’ll put fifty million into Fund IV as anchor if we clear their operational diligence,” he said. “Data room by mid-October.”
Maggie’s expression stayed where it was. “Who runs their diligence?”
“A man named Travis Oyler.”
Maggie was quiet for a moment. Andy turned the legal pad around and pushed it toward her. She read the list, all six lines of it, and then she went back to the top and read the first four again, and he saw her eyes stop on the initials he had written beside the IC memos.
She slid the pad back. “I’ll start a longer one,” she said, and went to her own office and left the door open.
By 8:40 the floor was full, and Andy stood at his glass wall and watched it work.
Wyatt Pruitt was at his desk by the front window with the deal tracker open on one screen and an offering memorandum on the other. Wyatt had come over from a larger sponsor eighteen months ago and had built the tracker in his second week, because the CRM could not produce the view he wanted. Every inbound deal got a row: property, city, unit count, broker, and a status column that held one of four words. Pass, Maybe, Underwriting, Dead. What moved a deal from Maybe to Underwriting was a conversation with Andy, usually in the hallway, usually short. At the Friday deal meeting Wyatt had described his week better than Andy could have. “Ten minutes on the ones that deserve an hour. An hour on the ones that deserve ten.” Across the room, Tom had reached tab twelve.
Dana Tran was on the phone with a property manager, standing, one hand flat on her desk. Andy could hear her from his office when she raised her voice, which was rare. “If you patch the same roof leak every quarter,” she was saying, “that’s repairs and maintenance. You can’t put it below the line.” The manager said something. Dana closed her eyes. “I understand it makes the NOI look better. That’s my problem with it.”
In the back corner by the printer, Esther Ryu was rekeying a property manager’s monthly report into the underwriting model. Andy watched her do it for a while. The property manager’s system produced its numbers by property and by month. The LP report needed them by thesis, by vintage, and against the original underwriting, and no system at the firm produced that view. So Esther built it by hand, and every quarter the LP report took seventeen days to go out.
Arturo Ybarra’s desk was empty. In nine years at the firm Arturo had kept one habit above the others: he trusted a property report once he had driven out and checked it, and he had left for San Antonio at six. Maggie’s door, off the landing, was still open, which meant nothing was on fire yet. Beth Ann Sorensen was on a call with an LP, pacing the short stretch of carpet between her desk and the window, the way she did when she was listening more than talking. She had been raising Fund IV since January with no placement agent, one LP at a time, working from what she knew about each of them: who liked to hear from Andy directly, who wanted the co-invest call first, whose investment committee met in which month. The fund documents set a date for the final close whether she had found the rest of the money or not.
The firm had twenty-two people and had earned about fifteen million in fees last year, and about a hundred eighty more people worked at the properties for the management companies and would never see this room. Andy had been proud of those numbers for a long time, and he still was.
He also knew that a good part of the fifteen million came in with the seven closes, a fee at a time, and that he had never put the fees that arrived every year next to what it cost to run the firm. His own salary sat on the books at a number he had set in the syndication years and left there.
At 9:30 he walked down the floor to Nadia’s desk to ask what the deal team had told the Fund III families about co-invest.
Nadia was reading something on her main screen. On her second monitor her email drafts folder was open, and beside it, in a narrow panel down the right side of the screen, was a list headed with her own name. Under her name it said Drafts ready: 6.
The top draft was open. It was addressed to the investment office of a Dallas family that had been in Fund III since the first close. It answered their question about co-invest allocation on the next Fund IV deal, and it answered a second question they had tucked into the last line of their email, about when Fund III’s next distribution would go out.
Andy read it standing behind her chair. It was a good letter, warmer and clearer than most of what went out of the firm. It explained how the firm allocated co-invest between Fund III and Fund IV investors, and Andy read that part twice, because it described a sensible allocation policy and the firm did not have one. Then the draft gave the family a month for Fund III’s next distribution.
Nobody had approved a month. Andy had not, and Maggie would have told him. The draft was signed Nadia.
“What is this?” he said.
Nadia turned in her chair and saw what he was looking at. She left the window open, and he noticed that.
“It’s an agent,” she said. “A personal one, on a consumer service. I set it up in late August, on my own time.” She pointed at the panel. “I connected it to my firm mailbox with my own login. Co-invest questions and deal-level LP questions come to the deal team, and most of them come to me, so it reads them overnight and drafts my replies. I read them in the morning and send them myself.”
“All of them?”
“I read every one. I send the ones that are right. I rewrite the ones that aren’t.” She hesitated. “I started on the firm’s plan. It runs out of room long before my week does, and I was answering the same questions by hand at eleven at night.” She stopped. “Sorry. That sounded like complaining.”
“It didn’t.” He looked at the draft again. “This month. For the distribution. Where did it get that?”
Nadia leaned in and read it. He watched her face change. “I don’t know,” she said. “I would have caught it.”
Andy straightened up. He had two questions, and he asked them in order.
“Where does it run?”
“On the service’s own computers, in their cloud. I have the account page. I can show you.”
“Where does the mail go once it reads it?”
Nadia opened her mouth and closed it again. She looked at the panel with her name at the top of it, and then back at him.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Andy nodded slowly. He had expected to be angry.
“Drafts only,” he said. “Nothing leaves this building without you reading every line. Don’t delete anything, and don’t change a setting in that account until Anika has seen it.”
“I do read every line.”
“I know. Keep doing it. Pull everything you’ve sent since August that came out of that panel.” He tapped the edge of her desk once. “Tell Anika today.”
Nadia pulled her notebook over and wrote Anika at the top of a clean page and underlined it. Andy went back to his office and closed the door.
Maya was on a late shift at Dell Children’s, so Andy made dinner, which meant rice, the dal she had left in the refrigerator, and a cucumber he cut too thick. Diya set the table without being asked and sat down across from him. She had been saving a question all day.
“Was there snow?”
“On the mountains. The valley was still bare.”
“Did you see an elk?”
“I ate one.”
Diya considered this with the full seriousness of eleven. “Was it good?”
“It was very good.”
“What did the man want?”
“He wants to invest with us.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s good,” Andy said. He left out how good, and what it would take. He asked her about school, and she told him, at length, about a science project involving a potato, and he listened to all of it.
When she had finished she said, “Did you tell him about Dada’s shop?”
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it was the same business as his.”
Diya looked doubtful. “Dada’s shop was small.”
“It was the right size,” Andy said, and got up to clear the plates.
Tuesday the request list for the data room Walt had asked for came in at 7:52 in the morning, from Travis Oyler’s office, addressed to Beth Ann, who had heard about Aspen from Maggie the afternoon before, with Andy and Maggie copied. By 8:10 Beth Ann was standing in his doorway with it printed out.
She came in and closed the door and set the pages on his desk. Andy read the first page. It asked for the reasons behind the investment committee’s decisions going back years, and for the name of whoever reconciled the fund waterfalls.
He turned the page, and the next one, and saw that the stack ran a good deal longer than the first page had let on.
Beth Ann waited the few seconds she always waited before she said anything that mattered.
“Andy, we don’t have a data room.”
“We have the portal.”
“The portal is where we post the quarterly reports. This is something else.” She touched the stack. “Half of what they’re asking for, we have somewhere. The other half, somebody has to sit down and write.”
“How long?”
“A month for the real one; eighteen days if we only build the front.”
Andy counted the days to the fifteenth. “We have sixteen.”
Beth Ann looked at the stack. “Then we build the front, and I start tonight. But Andy, they’re going to see the seams.” She glanced through the glass toward Maggie’s open door, and back. “Maggie’s already pulling folders. She wants the conference table tomorrow morning.”
There was an email on his screen he had not opened. It was from Anika, two lines, sent at 7:31. Nadia came to see me yesterday. I’ll have questions for both of you once I’ve read the service’s terms.
Andy tore the top sheet off the legal pad and slid it across the desk. Beth Ann read down the list, and he watched her stop at item four.
“Scott’s in Cabo,” she said.
“Until Thursday.”
He picked up his phone and typed with his thumb, in lowercase, the way he always did. call me when you’re off the water. charlotte holdback.