Adrian was gone for forty minutes.
Daniel and I sat in the conference room with the registration document between us and the city moving outside the window. I refilled my coffee. Daniel had water. Neither of us said much. The shape of what we knew had changed, but the work of what came next hadn’t started, and I had learned, over years of standing inside broken companies, that the space between those two things required a specific kind of stillness.
When Adrian came back he looked like a man who had done something difficult and was now ready to move. He sat down. He turned the registration document face down, deliberately, like closing something that needed closing before the next thing could begin. “Tell me everything,” he said to Daniel. “All of it. From the beginning.”
So Daniel told
