Something was moving underneath the surface of all of this. I could feel it.
I sat at my desk with Lucas’s half-eaten sandwich going stale beside the keyboard and the Q4 projection open on my screen for the third time that afternoon and I kept coming back to that feeling, that specific low-grade pressure behind the sternum that I had learned over seven years of reading troubled companies means a variable you haven’t accounted for is already in motion. Richard Ashby in his office after Victoria’s call, sitting very still. A man who had agreed to something and was not yet certain he meant it.
I filed the feeling. I went back to work. I did what I always did when the thing I needed to know hadn’t arrived yet.
I waited.
Two days later, Adrian called.
“I’m taking Ethan somewhere this after
