Constantinople, Ottoman Empire — January, 1901 Ayaan was eleven now, and for the first time in his second life, he was about to run a business of his own — not just watch someone else run one.
It wasn’t going to be much.
No warehouse, no employees, no sign with his name on it, not even enough money to make anyone in Constantinople notice.
That was exactly how he wanted it.
He’d learned enough by now to know that beginnings were supposed to be small.
He stood in his father’s shop that morning, staring down at a small wooden box.
Inside were his coins — years of them, saved instead of spent.
He counted them once, then again, then a third time, even though he already knew the total.
Knowing and verifying weren’t the same thing.
His father had taught him that a long time ago.
“Finished?” Mehmet asked from behind the counter.
“Yes.” “How much?” Ayaan told him.
“You counted correctly.” “I think so.” “That’s better than saying you know,” his father said, and Ayaan couldn’t argue with it.
His savings weren’t impressive by any measure that mattered — small payments from errands, coins earned helping in the shop, gifts he’d never once spent, all of it kept in that same box for years while he resisted every small temptation to dip into it.
To anyone with real money they would have looked like nothing.
To Ayaan they were years of patience turned into something he could finally use.
“You’re serious about this,” Mehmet said.
“I am.” “Then you should understand something first.
Your first business might fail.
You might lose some of this money.
Your calculations might be wrong, and your customers might not want what you think they want.” “I know all of that.” “Then why keep going?” Ayaan looked down at the box.
“Because if I never try, I’ll never actually know.” His father was quiet for a moment, then pushed the box back toward him.
“Fair enough.
This is your money now.
I’ll advise you.
I’ll warn you.
I’ll stop you if you’re about to do something that could hurt the family.
But I won’t run this for you.” Ayaan understood exactly what that meant, and it felt like more than money.
It felt like being trusted with something real — the first time in either of his lives that a decision, and everything that came from it, belonged entirely to him.
Deciding what not to sell turned out to be harder than deciding what to sell.
He’d spent months watching the shop closely enough to know that paper, notebooks, ink, pens, and pencils all moved steadily, while other things sat on the shelf for weeks at a time without a single buyer.
He built a short list — cheap items people bought often at the top, slower-moving goods below that, and nothing that would tie up money he couldn’t afford to have sitting still.
A wealthier merchant could let cash sit trapped in unsold stock for months without noticing the difference.
Ayaan couldn’t.
Every coin spent on something that didn’t sell was a coin he couldn’t use anywhere else, at least not until it finally did.
His father had put it more simply, years earlier: money sitting in the wrong place can’t help you.
He finally understood exactly what that meant, the way you only really understand a lesson once it’s your own money on the line.
Finding a supplier was the first real problem.
He knew plenty through his father — but they knew Mehmet, not him, and that was a different thing entirely.
One morning his father took him to meet a broad-shouldered paper merchant named Hasan Efendi, the same man Ayaan had met years before at the harbor.
Hasan looked him over.
“This is the boy?” “My son,” Mehmet said.
“And he wants to buy?” “Yes.” Ayaan handed him the list.
Hasan’s smile faded slightly.
“That’s not much.” “I know.” “You want a discount on this?” “If I buy regularly, yes.” Hasan glanced at Mehmet.
“Does he always negotiate like this?” “Only when he thinks he’s right.” “Then he must be difficult.” “I’m willing to pay a fair price,” Ayaan said.
“Fair to both of us.” That got a genuine laugh out of the man.
“Good answer.” Ayaan had no interest in tricking anyone — Hasan needed customers, and he needed inventory, and there was no reason to pretend the arrangement wasn’t good for them both.
He asked his questions plainly: how often Hasan could supply him, whether the quality would stay consistent, what happened if a shipment arrived damaged, whether the price held if he ordered more later, whether he could pay immediately or would need time.
Then, carefully, he asked whether he could buy on credit.
Hasan studied him.
“You want credit?” “Not necessarily.
I need to know my options.” “Smart,” Hasan said, and tapped the list.
“Pay in full for the first order.
Come back and buy again, and we’ll talk about credit.” That was enough for now.
Credit, Ayaan understood, wasn’t something you asked for.
It was something you earned by showing up again.
The first purchase happened two days later.
He counted out every coin himself, and when the goods arrived, he checked everything against his list — every bundle, every notebook, every bottle of ink, every pencil — while his father watched without stepping in even once.
Everything matched.
The pile of merchandise sitting in front of him wasn’t much to look at, a few bundles of paper and some cheap stationery, but it was his, in a way nothing had ever quite been his before.
If it sold, the gain was his.
If it didn’t, so was the loss, and for the first time that felt like something worth having rather than something to be afraid of.
That evening he opened a fresh notebook and wrote across the top: Ayaan Hassan — Business Account.
Underneath: starting capital, then the cost of the inventory, then empty space waiting for his first sale.
His first customer wasn’t anyone special — just a boy from a nearby school looking for a notebook.
After weeks of planning, calculating, and negotiating with a grown man twice his size, his first sale in the world came down to one boy picking up two notebooks and asking, “Can you lower the price?” Ayaan’s margin was already thin, but the difference was small, and the customer was a student, so he shaved it down slightly.
The boy paid and left without a second thought, already halfway out the door before the coin had even settled in Ayaan’s palm.
Ayaan stood there looking at the coin in his hand.
“Congratulations,” his father said.
“That’s it?” “That’s it.
You sold a notebook.
You didn’t conquer Constantinople.” “Not yet,” Ayaan said, and his father laughed harder than the moment probably deserved.
By the end of the week he’d made several more sales and found his first real mistake — thirty envelopes, bought on the assumption that people who wrote letters would buy them regularly.
They didn’t, not nearly as often as he’d guessed.
His father noticed the stack sitting untouched on the shelf.
“Problem?” “I bought too many.
Thirty.” “How many have you sold?” “Three.” “Then you have twenty-seven,” Mehmet said, with the particular calm of a man enjoying himself just a little too much.
Ayaan had confused people needing something, in theory, with people actually buying it often, which turned out to be a very different question.
He wrote the lesson down — useful doesn’t mean a good inventory choice — and tried bundling the envelopes together with paper instead of simply cutting the price and taking the loss outright.
It wasn’t spectacular, but within two weeks the excess had mostly cleared, and he’d learned something worth more than the money the mistake had cost him.
Selling, he was learning, wasn’t the hardest part.
Deciding what to do with the money afterward was.
He wanted to reinvest everything to grow faster, but one bad surprise could leave him with no cash to buy anything at all.
So he split what he had into rough categories — inventory, reserve, profit — and accepted that keeping a reserve would slow him down.
Slow and steady beat fast and fragile, and his father’s old rule held here too: never risk what you can’t afford to lose.
His small business started drawing a little attention — not much, but enough to notice.
Customers realized he remembered prices, and what they usually bought without needing to be told twice.
One man came in looking for a specific kind of paper Ayaan didn’t have in stock.
“I can get it,” Ayaan told him, instead of pretending otherwise.
“Three days.” “How do you know that?” “I’ll ask my supplier.” He did, and Hasan had it.
Three days later, the paper arrived, and the customer came back the following week, and the week after that.
Ayaan understood something from it that mattered more than any single sale: a business didn’t always win people over by having everything in stock.
Sometimes it won them over just by keeping its word.
One afternoon Zeynep came by to see it for herself, looking around at the shelves like she was inspecting a much larger operation than the one actually in front of her.
“You actually did it.” “Started, you mean?” “Yes.” She picked up a notebook, asked the price, set it back down.
“You sound like a merchant now.” “I am one.” “It’s smaller than I expected.” “It’s not really a shop,” he admitted.
“More of a business.” “That’s even smaller.” She spotted the stack of leftover envelopes.
“What happened here?” “I bought too many.
I made a bad guess.” “And now?” “I’m selling them off slowly.” “Then you didn’t really fail,” she said.
“You made a mistake and fixed it.
That’s different.” He turned that over for a second.
She might have been right — failure wasn’t always the mistake itself.
Sometimes it was refusing to fix it.
The months went on, spring into summer into autumn, and the business stayed small but kept surviving, which turned out to matter more than he’d expected going in.
He learned to order based on what actually sold instead of what he assumed would.
He learned that reliable customers earned better terms from suppliers the same way reliable merchants earned loyal customers.
Mostly, he learned that business wasn’t an idea you could think your way through — it was daily work, carrying boxes and counting coins and talking to suppliers, sometimes dull, sometimes frustrating, occasionally satisfying, and his knowledge of the future only ever sped up the thinking part.
It never did the carrying, the counting, or the talking for him.
The future could hand him an idea.
It couldn’t hand him today’s labor.
Near the end of 1901, after closing up alone one evening, he sat with his first business notebook open in front of him — starting capital, purchases, sales, mistakes, small profits, small losses, every one of them modest enough that nobody in the empire would ever have reason to notice him.
That was fine.
He hadn’t expected them to yet, and he wasn’t in any hurry to change that.
On the last page of the year, he wrote two lines: First business: survived.
And beneath it: Next step: grow carefully.
He closed the notebook and looked around the shop one more time — the same plain shelves, the same creaking floor, nothing about the place that suggested anything remarkable was happening inside it.
But something had shifted all the same.
He wasn’t simply getting ready for a future anymore.
In his own small way, using paper and pencils and a wooden box of coins, he’d started making it.