Not much, but enough. When you walk into that room tomorrow, she said, "You will be presenting to a table that includes at least two people who have a direct financial interest in this narrative staying buried. They will not come after the numbers first. They'll come after you. He was quiet.
They'll question your qualifications to interpret financial data, she said. They'll question whether you understood what you were looking at when you flagged it. They may raise your performance history. Look for inconsistencies. Try to suggest you have a personal motive.
She said it evenly. The way you say a hard thing to someone who needs to hear it without padding. I want you to know that before you walk in. I know. He said, "You know, Amelia, he said her name the same way he'd said it Friday, like it was real.
I've been a black man in corporate America for 12 years. People questioning whether I understood what I was looking at is not a new experience. Silence. That shouldn't be true." She said, "Quiet, genuine." No, he said it shouldn't, but it is. And I've learned to use it.
When people underestimate what you understand, they don't protect themselves from you the way they should. She was quiet for another moment. Get some sleep, she said. You, too. I'll try.
He went to check on Lily, who had gotten out of the bath on her own and was in bed with a picture book she was definitely too old for, but still loved. And he sat on the edge of her mattress and read the last four pages with her and kissed her forehead and turned off the light. In the dark hallway outside her door, he stood for a moment with his hands still on the door frame. He thought about the boardroom, about 11 directors and four who might follow the numbers, about Caldwell and Penn on a golf course somewhere, 18 months of patience, a $12 million failure that hadn't been a failure at all, but had been made to look like one. He thought about what it meant to walk into a room and put the truth on the table in front of people who had invested in a specific lie.
He thought about his daughter, who believed without question that her father was always brave. He went to bed. He slept 4 hours Thursday morning, 6:30 a. M. He was up before his alarm, which was unusual and also inevitable.
He showered, dressed the gray suit, the one his sister Diane had told him looked like authority walking, which he thought at the time was an overstatement and had since reconsidered. He made breakfast for Lily, got her dressed, walked her to Mrs. Okonquo's door with her backpack and her lunch and the specific top of her head that she complained about every morning and leaned into every morning simultaneously. "You look fancy, daddy," she said. "Big day," he said.
Are you nervous? He looked at her, 7 years old, watching him with his own eyes. A little, he said. That's okay. She considered this.