I've been in meetings for 36 hours. My board did an emergency session yesterday. 12 hours. The SEC called this morning. My legal team has been in my office since Tuesday.
Another pause. I'm more tired than I've been in a long time, and I keep thinking about the security dispatch office on floor 16 and that terrible coffee. He almost smiled. That was pretty bad coffee. It was the best coffee I've ever had, she said.
And she meant it in the way that you mean it when it's not really about the coffee at all. He moved away from the building access panel, gave himself 6 ft of distance from the noise of the system. The board meeting, he said, "How did it go? Complicated. " She exhaled. Ethan had allies on the board, people who knew him, who trusted him, who genuinely did not believe it until Marsh laid the documentation in front of them and walked them through it transaction by transaction.
A pause. Two board members resigned. One is under separate investigation. The rest are shaken, angry, looking at me to tell them how this happened on my watch. How do you answer that?
I tell them the truth. Her voice was steady, but something in it was raw at the edges. I trusted someone I'd worked with for 13 years. I believed loyalty was established. I was wrong.
And then I found the evidence and I acted on it, and the acting on it is what brought everything out into the open. Another pause. I can't make them feel better about the fact that it happened. But I can show them what I did when I found out. That's enough, Darius said.
I keep telling myself that it is enough. He said a person can only be held to what they do with what they know. You didn't know when you knew you moved a silence. You're very certain about things. She said not critically with something that sounded like relief.
I have a 12-year-old who needs me to be certain, he said. You get practiced at it. She laughed a real laugh, brief and genuine. And the first time he'd heard her make that sound and it did something to the air on his side of the phone call that he decided not to examine too closely. "How is Maya? " she said.
"She's good. She figured out I was in the building before I told her. Read it on the news and put the pieces together. " "Smart kid, terrifyingly so. " Another laugh. Then, Darius, I want to ask you something and I want you to know that the answer, whatever it is, is the right answer. There's no wrong answer and I'm not calling to pressure you.