She looked at him with open irritation. "Your money can buy better equipment than this," he continued, gesturing at the foam pad where it had landed. "It can't buy a shorter neurological timeline. The work is the work. " She hated him a little for that. She kept coming back at 6:00 a.
M. 3 weeks in, she felt warmth. It was during the cold and hot cylinder exercise, and she wasn't sure at first she had been fooled before by what she wanted to feel. But he switched the cylinders twice without telling her. And both times she identified the warm one correctly.
That's new. He said it might be nothing. It might be, but it wasn't there two weeks ago. He wrote something in his notebook. He had a notebook spiralbound, the kind sold at drugstores in which he documented every session.
He wrote in it after nearly every exchange in a short hand she couldn't read from across the room and she had noticed he always dated each entry before closing it. The voluntary contraction came a few days after that. A sustained tightening of the left quadricep that lasted nearly 4 seconds. He timed it. She felt the muscle under her own palm and said nothing for a long moment.
"Is that what I think it is? " she asked. "Yes," he said. She nodded once and told him they should move on to the next exercise. She found out about the complaint on a Thursday morning. Renee forwarded her the internal memo without comment.
A note from HR indicating that an anonymous report had been filed alleging that an unlicensed individual was conducting unauthorized therapeutic treatment on a company executive on company premises. Quentyn had been verbally cautioned. A copy of the complaint had also been sent to his university's professional conduct office. Helena read the memo twice. Then she called Renee.
"Who filed it? " "It was anonymous," Renee said. "Who filed it? " A pause. The routing metadata on the internal system puts it through a terminal registered to Bridget Kane's floor. Helena set the phone down and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Bridget Kaine had been on the board for 11 years, had never approved of Helena's father's decision to hand the company to his daughter, and had spent the better part of the last 8 months quietly canvasing other board members with the argument that a CEO who couldn't walk into a meeting under her own power was a liability the company couldn't afford.
That evening, Helena told Quentyn what had happened. "I can have our legal team respond," she said. "No," he said. It would be straightforward to no. His voice was steady, not angry.
If you put lawyers on this, it looks like you're using company resources to protect a personal arrangement. That's exactly what Bridget wants it to look like. He paused. I don't need protection. I need to keep doing the work.