She did not sound convinced. Eat the rice. He ate the rice. The rest of Friday passed in the specific texture of regular life that Marcus both needed and couldn't quite settle into Lily's homework. A grocery run, a load of laundry, a phone call with his sister Diane in Atlanta who talked for 40 minutes about her boyfriend's mother and ended with you sound distracted.
Marcus, what's going on? And he said nothing, just tired. And she said, you're always tired. You need to let somebody help you. And he said, I know.
And meant it. And also had no idea what that would look like. At 2:58, he put Lily in front of a movie, went to his bedroom, closed the door. At 3 exactly, his phone rang. Marcus, her voice was different from this morning.
Compressed. She'd had 6 hours and she'd used them. I need to know how much of what you saw is documented. Enough, he said. Copies, dated, stored off system.
She exhaled. It was the first time he'd heard her do that. Just exhale like she'd been holding something and could set it down for a second. Okay, she said. Okay, good.
That's good. What have you found? I had my personal attorney pull the original board presentation files from the archive this afternoon. She said the ones that went to the directors for the Henderson review. Then I had her pull the operational submissions that fed into them.
A pause. Marcus, the numbers don't match. I know the variance is almost $400,000 in projected operational costs. Someone lowered your team's numbers and inflated the timeline risk factor. It made the whole project look like an operations failure.
Her voice stayed level, but he could hear what was under it. The particular controlled fury of a person who has just duck a fab that what they'd accepted as their failure was something that had been done to them. If the board had seen the real numbers, the project would have looked marginal but viable. Instead, they saw something that looked like my operations team had fundamentally misjudged the scope, which reflected on your judgment, Marcus said. Your decision to greenlight it.
Yes. And it gave the board grounds to question your leadership. Yes. Quieter. Now, the vote of confidence I got in September where six out of 11 directors were uni.