“Eventually, maybe. But not until he understands what he did wrong. Not until he actually sees me.”
“We see you,” Dad said. “We are proud of you. We always have been.”
“You are proud now that Forbes validated me. You are proud now that you have something to brag about to your friends. But when I was doing the hard work, when I was building this company from nothing, struggling through the early years, you did not care then.”
“That is not true.”
“It is true. When I told you we raised our Series A, you asked when I was going to get a real job. When I told you we hit profitability, you changed the subject to Marcus’s promotion. When I told you we raised Series B, you asked why I was not dating anyone.”
My voice was steady, but my hands were shaking.
“I love you both, but you have never cared about my work. You cared about whether my work made me acceptable by your standards, and it did not until someone else told you it was important.”
“Lily, please.”
“I have to go. I have a conference call with our Tokyo office.”
I hung up.
That night, alone in my apartment, I let myself cry.
Not from sadness exactly.
From release.
From finally saying the things I had kept inside for years.
From acknowledging the hurt instead of minimizing it.
Marcus came to Palo Alto two weeks later.
He texted first, asking if he could visit. I told him okay, but just for coffee. Nothing more.
We met at a café near my office.
He looked terrible. Dark circles under his eyes. His usually neat hair disheveled. He had lost weight.
“Thank you for seeing me,” he said as we sat down with our drinks.
“You look awful.”
“I feel awful. I cannot sleep. I keep thinking about all the times I could have asked you about your work and did not. All the times you tried to tell me things and I did not listen.”
“That is good. You should think about it.”
He winced.
“I deserve that. I deserve all of it.”
He pulled out his phone.
“I made a list of every time I remember you mentioning your company and I did not follow up. It is embarrassingly long.”
I did not ask to see it.
“Emma will not take my calls,” he continued. “I wrote her a letter apologizing, explaining that I am working on myself, that I understand what I did wrong. She sent it back unopened.”
“That is her choice.”
“I know. I just thought if you could forgive me, maybe she would, too.”
“I have not forgiven you yet, Marcus. I am having coffee with you. That is different.”
He nodded, looking miserable.
“What do I have to do to earn forgiveness?”
“I do not know. Maybe start by actually understanding what I do. Ask me questions. Real questions. Not because you want me to advocate with Emma, but because you actually care.”
“Okay.”
He pulled out a notebook.
“Tell me about Neural Systems from the beginning. Everything.”
So I did.
I told him about the idea that had sparked in my final year of my PhD: using natural language processing to make expert knowledge accessible.
I told him about founding the company with two classmates in a rented office space in Mountain View.
I told him about the first year, when we had no clients and I maxed out my credit cards to keep us afloat.
I told him about our first major client, a hospital system that wanted to pilot our diagnostic tool.
I told him about the terrifying moment when we pitched to our first venture capital firm, about the Series A funding that let us hire real engineers and expand our technology.
I told him about the hard years. The competing products. The technical setbacks. The employees who left. The investors who doubted us.
I told him about the moment our algorithm correctly identified a rare condition that three human doctors had missed, and we realized we were onto something real.
I told him about scaling from ten employees to fifty to two hundred, about opening offices in London and Singapore, about the Series C and Series D funding rounds that valued us at over 2 billion dollars.
Marcus listened.
He took notes.
He asked questions.
Good questions. Thoughtful questions.
“The medical diagnosis application,” he said. “You said it helped people get answers earlier. Can you quantify that?”