Hartwell's resignation stood. Forsythe was formally cleared of intentional wrongdoing as Claire had believed she would be and remained on the board. The governance review also produced a set of recommended policy reforms. Claire presented them to the full board in March. They were comprehensive and specific and they addressed, not just the technical compliance failures, but the cultural conditions that had allowed those failures to go unnoticed, the ways power consolidated itself.
The ways people in service roles were systematically overlooked. The ways assumptions about background and appearance substituted for actual assessment of character and capability. She put Marcus in the room for that presentation, not as a symbol, as the director of strategic operations whose purview included internal process reform, and who had three specific proposals in the document being presented that were his own work. When the board voted to adopt the reforms, Marcus did not react outwardly. He sat at the table and made a note in his folder, the same way he'd made notes all through the presentation.
Professional, specific, present, but underneath that, in the place where he kept the things that were true and private and not for boardrooms, he felt something settle, something that had been unsettled for a very long time. Not just since the falsified report and the Friday walkout and the 87 resumes. Longer than that. The thing that settles when you have spent your whole life in a world that looked at you and made decisions before you spoke and you have watched it just once be forced to look again and revise. He didn't celebrate it.
He didn't make a speech about it. He picked up his folder and walked out of the boardroom and called Amara on the way to the elevators because she'd had a science test that morning and he'd told her he'd call after. "How'd the test go?" he asked. "94."
she said. "Yeah?" "I missed one about cell mitosis." she said. "I knew it but I second-guessed myself."
"Trust yourself more." he said. "I know." she said. "How was your thing?"
"Good." he said. "Really good." "Settled good or just regular good?" she said.
He smiled. "Settled good." "Okay." she said sat- isfied. "Can we have tacos tonight?"
"Yeah." he said. "We can have tacos tonight." He ended the call. Stood in the elevator, rose toward the lobby with the weight of the building above him and the weight of the past 2 years somewhere behind him and the weight of the next thing the real ordinary, consequential, imperfect, ongoing thing somewhere ahead.