“Actually, I have both a project and a plan to make sure you don’t have a shortfall.” He leaned a hip into her desk, eyes refusing to let her look away. He was done playing. “Listen, I have no intention of taking any money away from your work. At least not in the long run. Your project will take at least a few years, and not all the costs are up front. My project needs seed money. Once we build the app and the database, it should start to earn out and it will fund back into the endowment.”

“There’s an awful lot of ifs in there.”

“Aren’t there in everything? If you had let ifs stop you, we wouldn’t be here.” The glance he threw around her pink office was filled with respect. “We take a small part of the challenge and deal with only that. A large percentage of the homeless population is people who’ve had a spate of bad luck. What I’m about to tell you is confidential.” He waited for her to acknowledge that and she nodded.

“Hari has been living on the street.”

Her hand went to her face. “How?”

Vansh explained how Hari’s business partner had cheated him and how he’d been homeless the entire time he’d worked on Yash’s campaign. “There are a lot of others like him. People who’ve lost their homes because of not having a safety net. An illness, a lost job, an ill child. They have skills that local companies need. We identify them, identify opportunities, and then train each person based on their individual skills for a particular job. Like a match database. One person at a time.”

“I have no doubt there are other agencies that do exactly that. How would this be any different?”

“The key is the software that’s able to track and identify the skills of the homeless population in real time and an algorithm that matches that to local opportunities.”

“An algorithm.” She pushed her hand into her hair. The shorter-than-she-was-used-to strands had slid out of her clip and were falling all over her face. Her shortsightedness, not to mention hubris, in cutting it to save Yash’s ass when it didn’t need saving was just the reminder of her own stupidity that she needed.

“Yes. One that also tracks short-term and long-term jobs across local companies. It’s like Tinder but for job hookups. We’ll have to get companies to commit to hiring and training. But with the Omnivore Foundation’s name, and the social justice cachet, that’s doable. I already talked to the PR departments of a couple of the biggest employers here and they seem excited.”

When had he put all this together?

Don’t trust him. “And who’s going to create this app?”

“It’s what Hari does. Mehta’s already excited.”