Paper Losses

Margot hadn't noticed the first gray hair until the morning of the Johnson & Grove merger—three strands, luminous as silver wire against her bathroom mirror. At thirty-four, she supposed it could have been worse. Her father had gone fully salt-and-pepper by twenty-nine, the same year his first restaurant went under. But standing there in her penthouse bathroom, she traced those rebellious hairs and wondered if stress was hereditary, or if the market had simply caught up with her.

By noon, the bull market had turned savage. Margot watched her terminal bleed red—half a billion dollars evaporating in real-time as Johnson & Grove's CEO, a man named Warren who dispensed bullish forecasts like forgiveness, announced that their earnings projections had been, in his words, "overly ambitious." Warren's bullishness had always reminded Margot of her college boyfriend's: all conviction, no substance, the kind of confidence that could charm a room until the doors locked and the checks bounced.

That was when the cat appeared.

It materialized outside her floor-to-ceiling glass office like a smudge of ink against Manhattan's skyline—gaunt, patchy-furred, possessed of those ancient, judgmental eyes that seem to know your credit score. Margot had never particularly liked cats. Her mother had kept three Siamese, imperious creatures who regarded visitors as inconvenient servants. But this stray sat with quiet dignity through Warren's panicked conference calls, through the junior analysts' tears, through Margot's own suppressed screaming.

She named him Bull.

The irony wasn't lost on her. Warren's bullish lies had cost her bonus, potentially her job. Meanwhile, this scrawny bull of a cat was outlasting everyone, curled beneath her desk as if the implosion of a billion-dollar deal was merely Tuesday. When her assistant finally packed his box, when the lawyers descended with their severance packages, Bull simply yawned and extended one claw-tipped paw toward her ankle—an assessment, not a threat.

"You staying?" Margot asked, as if the cat could possibly understand.

Bull blinked. Outside, the trading floor continued its carnage. Somewhere, Warren was still bullish, still spinning narratives, still losing other people's money with the optimism of a man who'd never missed a meal.

Margot reached down. The cat's fur was surprisingly soft. Her fingers found another gray hair at her temple, then another, and she laughed—really laughed, for the first time in months.

"Yeah," she said. "Me too."

Bull purred. The market closed down eleven hundred points. And for the first time in her career, Margot walked out before the bell.