Chapter 57: It's Mine (Bonus Chapter)

The basketball part of Kobe’s life had gotten louder.

Every preseason game brought more questions. More reporters waited near his locker. More people recognized him when he walked into restaurants. Even practices had begun carrying a different weight as Harris moved him between lineups and tested where he fit.

The other thing Kobe had started building was considerably quieter.

Rob had been working on it for weeks.

There had been phone calls Kobe took between practices, documents waiting for signatures when he got home, and meetings squeezed into whatever hours the Lakers left him. The attorney had handled the legal structure. The CPA had begun separating accounts and organizing records. The investment adviser Rob had found was already putting the plan they had discussed months earlier into motion.

Microsoft. Cisco. Nike.

Those were only the beginning.

What they didn’t have was somewhere to put any of it.

Rob had been operating out of his own office, carrying folders between meetings and keeping half of Kobe’s growing financial life in somebody else’s filing cabinets. That worked when all they had were a few accounts and a plan.

It wasn’t going to work forever.

They met after practice, Kobe still in his gym clothes, a Lakers windbreaker zipped to the neck and a duffel slung over one shoulder. Rob was waiting at the side entrance with his car keys in hand.

“You’re driving,” Rob said, tossing them over.

Kobe caught them. “Where to?”

“Westside. Two stops. First one’s a maybe. Second one I think you’ll like.”

The drive took less than half an hour. Rob spent most of it on the car phone, confirming appointment times before getting pulled into an argument with the attorney handling the new company’s paperwork.

Kobe only caught pieces of it—something about a signature page, another document that had been sent to the wrong office, and Rob repeating for the third time that no, Monday was not soon enough.

He finally hung up at a red light and dropped the phone back into its cradle.

“Tell me again why I’m doing this?”

Kobe glanced over. “The money, fulfillment, being the best agent ever?”

“I offered to represent you.”

“You should’ve read the fine print.”

Rob looked at him for a second, then shook his head exhaustedly. “There was no fine print.”

The light changed.

Their first stop sat inside a building that looked new enough to have opened that morning. Glass covered most of the exterior, chrome framed the entrance, and the stone lobby had been polished until the lights reflected off the floor.

A commercial broker in a tailored suit met them near the entrance.

She knew who Kobe was. That became obvious almost immediately, though she was professional enough not to make much of it.

“This is one of our signature properties,” she said as the elevator carried them upstairs. “For a business that’s going to have clients coming through regularly, presentation matters.”

The doors opened onto another quiet hallway.

She led them through a set of double doors and into a suite large enough that Kobe stopped just inside.

There were offices on both sides, a reception area near the entrance and a conference room with enough chairs for half the Lakers roster. The corner office had a heavy desk, built-in shelving and windows stretching nearly from floor to ceiling.

The broker walked them toward the glass.

“You get excellent light in here.”

Kobe stepped closer.

The view was good. From this high up, the buildings fell away toward the water, and on a clear day there probably wasn’t much in the city they couldn’t see.

The broker continued explaining the building’s security, parking, maintenance, and the work that had already gone into the suite.

Kobe listened until she finished.

“How much?”

“$132,000 a year, or $11,000 a month.”

Kobe looked through the glass one more time, then turned toward Rob.

“What’s the next one?”

The broker hesitated. “There are several other features I haven’t shown you yet. The executive offices on the other side—”

“I appreciate it,” Kobe said. “It’s a nice place.”

Rob understood.

He thanked her, collected the paperwork she’d prepared, and followed Kobe back toward the elevator.

They made it outside before he said anything.

“You didn’t even see half of it.”

“I saw enough.”

“You didn’t like the view?”

Kobe unlocked the car. “I can look out a window for free.”

Rob stopped beside the passenger door.

Then he got in.

The second property was farther inland, on a street lined with strip malls and two-story office buildings. There was no glass entrance, no security desk and nobody waiting outside in a suit.

The leasing agent met them inside.

“You guys here for the tour?”

Rob nodded. “That’s us.”

“Right this way.”

He took them upstairs and unlocked a door with a fading metal number beside it.

The suite was maybe a thousand square feet. A small reception area sat near the entrance. Beyond it were two offices, a cramped conference room, a storage closet, and an open area that could hold several desks without making people turn sideways to get past one another.

The carpet had seen better years. One wall needed paint.

The windows looked down at a parking lot.

Kobe walked through the entire place.

He checked the doors first.

Then the storage.

“Can we lock this?”

The leasing agent looked at the closet.

“Sure. We can change the hardware.”

Kobe moved into the open area.

“How many desks?”

“Comfortably? Four. Maybe five. Six if you don’t mind everybody getting friendly.”

Kobe looked toward the divider separating the open area from one of the offices.

“What if that comes out?”

“More.”

“Phone lines?”

“Already wired. You’d just have to get service connected.”

Kobe opened the storage closet and looked inside.

The agent followed him.

“We can add more filing space back here too. Rolling cabinets, shelving, whatever you need.”

Kobe nodded.

“How much?”

The leasing agent looked down at the sheet in his hand. “Eighteen fifty a month.”

Kobe glanced around the office again.

“Utilities?”

“You’d cover electricity and phone. Water’s included.”

Kobe nodded.

He looked around once more. “What about buying it?”

The agent glanced down at the sheet in his hand.

“Owner’s asking a hundred and ten thousand.”

Kobe looked at him. “For the whole unit?”

“The whole unit. You’d have association fees, property taxes, insurance. Place needs some work too.”

“How much are the fees?”

The agent gave him the number.

Rob had been watching from the doorway.

“We’ll take it.”

The agent smiled. “I’ll get the paperwork.”

Back in the car, Rob set the folder on his lap but didn’t start talking until Kobe pulled out of the parking lot.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“The other place was a lot nicer.”

“That other place cost money for people to think we have money.”

Rob considered that.

“Not wrong.”

Kobe glanced once in the rearview mirror at the building shrinking behind them.

“This one works as a starter office. It ain’t like we are going to stay here indefinitely.”

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The purchase took longer than Kobe wanted.

Rob handled most of it with the attorney. The inspection turned up nothing serious, the title work came back clean, and after more signatures than Kobe thought one thousand square feet should require, the unit was theirs.

The office simply gave all of it an address.

What followed over the next several days was the less interesting part.

Signatures.

Insurance forms.

Banking documents.

Phone calls.

Deliveries that never seemed to arrive when they were supposed to.

Kobe had forgotten just how much paper starting a business could produce.

They bought furniture the same way Kobe approached the office itself: functional first.

Rob picked out a large wooden desk for Kobe.

Kobe looked at it.

“Too big.”

“It’s a desk.”

“It takes up half the room.”

Kobe walked farther down the showroom and stopped beside a plain steel-and-laminate one.

“That.”

Rob stared at it.

“That looks like something a high school principal would use.”

“It holds paper.”

“So does the other one.”

“This one costs less.”

Rob looked toward the salesman.

“We’ll take this one.”

The chairs took longer.

Eventually neither of them cared enough to keep discussing them, and Rob ordered the standard ones.

Then came the filing cabinets, shelving, a conference table, landline phones, fax machine, copier, and printer.

The computers arrived last.

Kobe happened to be there when the first one was unpacked.

The monitor took up nearly half the desk.

He stood in front of it for several seconds.

Rob came through the doorway carrying a box.

“What?”

Kobe pointed toward the monitor.

“That’s the new one?”

Rob looked at it.

“Yes.”

Kobe stared at it another second.

“Nothing.”

Rob set the box down.

“What’s wrong with it?”

Kobe walked past him, shaking his head.

Rob watched him go, then looked back at the computer as if there might actually be something wrong with it.

They hired one person to keep the place running.

The woman Rob brought in had spent years handling books and office accounts for small businesses around Los Angeles. She was older, organized, and unimpressed by almost everything.

Kobe liked her immediately.

He sat across from her during the interview and worked through the questions Rob had prepared. Experience. References. Payroll. Record keeping. Confidentiality.

She answered each one without wasting words.

Near the end, Kobe set the paper down.

“Do you care about basketball?”

She looked at him.

“Not especially.”

Kobe glanced at Rob.

“Hired.”

Rob lowered his pen.

“We’re supposed to finish the interview.”

“I did.”

The woman looked between them.

“Do I get to know what the job pays before I’m hired?”

Kobe looked at Rob.

Rob sighed and reopened the folder.

They worked it out.

She became the office manager and bookkeeper, handling the phones, records, deliveries, and everyday paperwork while coordinating with the CPA and attorney when something needed their attention. The professionals didn’t work out of the office. They came and went as needed.

That was enough.

Within days, boxes had started collecting against one wall. Financial newspapers appeared on the conference table every morning. Filing cabinets that had arrived empty began filling with statements, contracts, and tax records.

And for the first time, the investment operation Kobe and Rob had discussed months earlier existed somewhere other than folders and meetings borrowed from other people’s offices.

A few days later, Kobe came straight from practice for the first portfolio review held in the new space.

The place sounded different when he walked in.

The phone rang near the front. Their new office manager answered it without looking up from the papers spread across her desk. Somewhere in the back, the copier started and stopped twice before making an unpleasant grinding noise.

Kobe looked toward it.

“It’s been doing that all morning,” she said.

Kobe kept walking to the conference room with a smile.

Rob was already in the conference room with the CPA and the investment adviser.

The adviser had spent years managing money for business owners and families who preferred keeping their names out of newspapers. That had mattered more to Kobe than the size of the accounts she’d handled.

She didn’t care that he played for the Lakers.

She cared whether he understood what he owned.

That was why he’d agreed to work with her.

Rob had several folders stacked beside him when Kobe entered.

“You’re late.”

Kobe checked the clock.

“Two minutes.”

Rob pulled out the chair beside him.

Kobe dropped his duffel near the wall and sat.

The adviser slid a folder across the table.

“First report in the new office.”

Kobe opened it.

Most of the names were familiar.

Microsoft.

Cisco.

Nike.

There were several more conservative positions the adviser had talked him into using to balance the portfolio, along with the cash they had deliberately kept available rather than putting everything into the market at once.

Numbers ran across the page beside each one.

Some black.

Some red.

The adviser tapped the first section.

“Microsoft has done well since we established the position. Cisco hasn’t moved much. Nike’s pulled back some.”

Kobe scanned the page.

A few weeks didn’t mean anything.

He hadn’t bought any of them with a few weeks in mind.

His finger stopped beside one of the red numbers.

“What happened here?”

“Nothing specific to the company,” she said. “The sector pulled back.”

“Anything change with the business?”

“Nothing that changes our original reasoning.”

Kobe moved to the next line.

“Then leave it.”

The adviser nodded.

They continued.

The conversation moved away from individual prices fairly quickly and into the numbers Kobe cared more about. How much cash they were keeping available. What needed to remain untouched for taxes and expenses. How the first NBA checks would be divided once the regular season started. How endorsement money would be handled. What belonged to Kobe personally and what would move into the investment structure.

The CPA walked him through the tax side.

Kobe asked questions when something wasn’t clear but mostly listened.

He’d spent enough of his first life around money to know what happened when people confused earning it with understanding it.

That was why they were sitting here.

At one point he tapped the cash allocation.

“How much of this stays liquid?”

The adviser gave him the number.

“Even if we find something we like?”

“Especially then.”

Kobe looked up.

She continued.

“You don’t know when the next opportunity comes. And you don’t want to be forced to sell something you like just to buy something else.”

Kobe nodded.

That made sense.

Rob leaned back in his chair.

“Look at that. You hired somebody who tells you no.”

“That was the point.”

The adviser ignored both of them and turned another page.

By the time they finished, Kobe had a clearer picture of where everything stood.

It wasn’t spectacular.

That didn’t bother him.

It wasn’t supposed to be.

Rob closed the first folder.

“All right. What do you want us looking at next?”

Kobe sat back.

He’d already given them the broad direction months ago. Computers. Communications. Technology. The infrastructure underneath all of it.

There was no reason to repeat the same conversation.

“Keep going where we were going,” he said. “Semiconductors. Networking. Software. Communications. Anything tied to computers and the Internet.”

The adviser made a note.

“Any specific companies?”

Several names came to him.

Some survived.

Some didn’t.

That distinction mattered.

“Bring me the best ones.”

She nodded.

Kobe looked at the folder again.

There was another part of this he’d been thinking about.

“What about private companies?”

The adviser stopped writing.

“What about them?”

“If we find something early, before it goes public, can we get in?”

Rob leaned forward slightly.

“You want to start investing in private companies?”

“Eventually.”

The adviser set her pen down.

“Sometimes you can. But that’s different from what we’re doing here.”

“How?”

“Access, for one. Good private companies don’t necessarily need your money. And the ones desperate for it aren’t always the ones you want.”

Kobe listened.

“You’ll also have less information,” she continued. “No public market telling you what something is worth. Your money could be tied up for years. Maybe longer. And if the company fails, there might not be anything left to sell.”

“So we don’t rush it.”

“I’m not asking to buy anything yet…”

Rob looked at him.

“What do you want?”

Kobe thought about it.

“I want to know what’s out there.”

The adviser waited.

“Not every company looking for a check,” Kobe continued. “Just people building something worth looking at.”

“Technology?”

“That and whatever in communications, sports, or consumer stuff. Anything that makes sense.”

Rob folded his arms.

“You think the next Microsoft is going to walk through that door?”

Kobe looked around the conference room.

The paint near one corner still needed touching up. One chair didn’t match the others. An extension cord ran along the wall because somebody had discovered too late that the outlet wasn’t where they needed it.

“Probably not yet.”

Rob smiled.

“So what do you want us to do?”

“Start making calls.”

“And?”

“See who’s worth meeting.”

The adviser picked her pen back up.

“That we can do.”

The CPA began packing her things while Rob gathered the paperwork from the first half of the meeting. Before the adviser left, she pulled another folder from her briefcase and slid it across to Kobe.

“Some of the industries and companies we’ve already been tracking. Public and private. Nothing I’m recommending yet.”

Kobe took it.

“Research?”

“Research.”

He opened the cover and skimmed the first page.

There were names he knew.

More that he didn’t.

“Thanks.”

She left with the CPA.

Their office manager was still at the front desk, phone tucked between her shoulder and ear as she wrote something onto a pad. The copier made the grinding noise again.

Rob stood in the conference room collecting the last of his papers.

He looked around.

The mismatched chairs. The boxes along the wall. The ugly phone sitting at the end of the table. The filing cabinets they’d barely had time to fill.

“We could still get you somewhere nicer.”

Kobe looked through the glass toward the front of the office.

Their office manager had hung up one call and was already answering another. Behind her sat the files that hadn’t existed a few weeks ago. On the conference table were reports carrying the name of a company that hadn’t existed a few months ago.

“I like it here.”

Rob looked around once more.

“What exactly do you like?”

Kobe didn’t answer immediately.

His eyes moved across the desks, the folders, the stacks of paper, and the boxes they still hadn’t unpacked.

Then he looked back at Rob.

“It’s mine.”