With the posture of someone attending a meeting she intended to chair. She came in one morning and asked him how Nia's math had been going. He paused in the middle of setting up the resistance band and looked at her. Better, he said. She got a 92 on her last test.
Helena nodded. Good. He went back to setting up the band. My father used to check my homework every night. She said, even when the company was struggling, even when he had every reason not to.
She wasn't looking at him. I didn't understand at the time what that cost him. She paused. I think I understand it now. Quentyn said nothing.
He handed her one end of the resistance band. She took it. The morning session proceeded as it always did, but something between them had shifted. Not dramatically, not with declaration, but with the irreversibility of a door swung fully open. The photographs appeared on a Tuesday morning.
Helena saw them first in her news aggregator at 7:00 a. M. Grainy stills pulled from what looked like security camera footage showing her in the standing frame. From Quentyn's hands visible at the edge of the frame. The headline accompanying them on a financial commentary site read, "Car Meridian CEO's secret therapy sessions raised questions about judgment oversight. " By 9:00 a.
M., it had been picked up by two business outlets. By noon, Car Meridian stock had dropped 2.5%. The narrative being constructed across the coverage was efficient and deliberate. An unlicensed individual had been given private access to the CEO of a major corporation. The nature of the relationship between them was unclear.
The company's board had not been informed. Questions had to be asked about whether Helena Carr's personal situation was compromising her professional decision-making. Renee brought her the first wave of coverage on a tablet and said nothing, which was how Helena knew it was bad. Quentyn arrived at the office at noon. He had seen the coverage.
He sat down across from her desk and said, "Tell me what you need. " "I need to know where those images came from. " "Building security," he said. "The cameras in this corridor are on a management level access system," he paused. I don't think this was spontaneous. It wasn't. Renee spent the afternoon tracing the access logs and came back with what she found the security archive had been accessed from a device registered to Bridget Kane's assistant two days before the images appeared online.
Bridget had also, it emerged, been in contact with Graham Pike, the CEO of Northgate Systems, a competitor that had made an informal acquisition approach to Car Meridian's board 18 months ago and been rebuffed. Helena sat with that information for an hour. Then Quentyn received notice from his university that his clinical rotation had been suspended pending a conduct review. The complaint cited concern that he had performed unsupervised therapeutic intervention on a vulnerable individual without appropriate credentials. They'll clear it.