Emotional instability, poor judgment, the right kind of vulnerability in all the wrong places. It was a narrow corridor, and Catherine had measured it carefully. Vivian looked at Elijah. She looked at the 12 people at the table. She looked at Catherine who was sitting with her hands folded and her expression perfectly calibrated.
And then she did the thing that Catherine, for all her 9 years and all her patient calculation, had not fully prepared for. She did not choose the narrow corridor. She stood up. She looked at the room, not at Catherine, not performing calm for the board members, not managing the optics. And she spoke.
"I've run this company for 12 years," she said. "I gave up everything that wasn't directly related to the work because I believed that was the standard I had to hold myself to. And I believed it was what made me effective here. I don't know if that was entirely correct, but I know what I want to try and I'd like the room to respect that it's mine to try. Then she looked at Elijah and said, "Yes, it's worth it."
She said it simply the way he said things. Catherine inhaled. The room shifted. Before she could speak, Rachel stepped through the door behind Elijah and placed a printed document on the table not in front of Vivian, in front of the board chair beside Catherine. She said that she had retained for the past 3 weeks correspondence she believed the board should review at its convenience.
She did not say what the correspondence contained. She did not need to. Catherine looked at the folder. The board chair looked at Catherine. Catherine maintained her composure with the skill of someone who had been maintaining it for decades, but the room's weight had redistributed and everyone in it felt the change.
The session ended without any resolution that Catherine had planned for. Elijah left the building before anyone thought to ask him anything further. He had not gone there to rescue anyone or dismantle anything or deliver a speech. He had gone because his daughter had been frightened and because straightforward problems deserved straightforward responses and because he had spent 4 years learning that complicated situations did not improve by being avoided. He walked out into the afternoon and sent a message to Derek that said only, "Don't sign me up for anything else."
Derek replied immediately with four questions. Elijah put his phone away. She texted him that evening, not a call, not through Rachel, from her own number which she typed directly into the message field. The bakery. Before you open?