Notice of an emergency session of the board of directors. Margaret said 7 tonight. The trust holding 62% has already voted its shares. You are suspended as chief executive. Effective immediately pending review of the items in that envelope.
Effective immediately. Dean didn't choose those words for her. She taught the whole building the phrase that morning. And he has always believed in using proven tooling. He picked up one of the flag signature pages, looked at the tab that said sign here, and set it back down.
Nothing's for sale, he said. Meetings at 7. Bring the pen. The board convened at seven laying into same room. And it smelled like cold coffee and consequences.
Margaret walked the directors through it without raising her voice once. The Meridian invoices against real market pricing. One 6 million skimmed, the phantom warehouse lease, the repriced contracts, the recovered emails, including the one that said none of it matters, the delegation with a dead notary seal and a stolen stamp of Dean's signature. Then the recording played once all the way through while Vanessa studied the tabletop and the directors studied her. She tried twice.
The first time was polish. This is a coordinated misreading of routine transactions. And I'd welcome an independent review. Nobody blinked. Accountants don't misread a parking lot pretending to be a warehouse.
The second time was quieter and it was aimed at Dean. Dean, we can fix this quietly. There's a version of tonight that doesn't embarrass anyone. We're better than a spectacle. Dean thought about the auditorium that morning, the cameras she'd ordered, the microphone pushed at his face on a live stream she'd staged for 300 of his people and every site in the company.
You had 11 months to fix it quietly, he said. You spent them renting a stamp of my name. You chose the spectacle this morning. I'm just honoring your production schedule. The vote took 9 minutes by Dean's watch.
9 minutes to unwind four years of borrowed light. Removal for cause unanimous with one abstension from a director who'd golfed with her too often to meet anyone's eyes. The forged delegation went to outside council with a referral packet. Her corporate cards died while she was still in the chair, and Ruth Ruth had not been idle since 11:10 that morning. By the time the vote closed, every Sinclair hire in the building had been terminated with documented cause.
The procurement director who' waved Meridian's invoices through the comm's chief who'd scrubbed the garage out of the orientation video. The chief brand officer with Dean's parking spot. Six people, six files, six clean letters. Fire every one of them isn't rage. When somebody has spent 11 months making sure every single letter would survive a wrongful termination suit, it's housekeeping.