Discovering

This is the last fucking swimming pool I’m ever cleaning, B thought. This really is the last one.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of his rust-dusted blue truck, waiting for his turn to drive off the ferry that shuttled him and his decaying pool gear from Seattle to Whidbey Island. He made this trip twice a month in the summer, and a couple of times throughout the winter for one person: WY — an entrepreneur with a $6 million waterfront estate on Smuggler’s Cove.

In the two years he had serviced WY’s pool and jacuzzi, B had never met the man. Instead, he learned about him through headlines in The Seattle Times. WY was always selling, buying, or merging one company with another. When he wasn’t brokering deals in the U.S., he was traveling to Tokyo to indulge in snail facials and win back-alley street races. Details of his life flooded social media and the press faster than a gash in an above-ground vinyl swimming pool. WY was the kind of balanced businessman that B liked t