Nobody answered. Nobody could. It was not a question anyone but Victoria could answer. And she wasn't ready to. Not yet.
She gathered her things and she walked out of the boardroom of the company she had built from 22 people and the door closed behind her and it was over. In the hallway outside, Emily Ross was standing by the elevators, not by design, just by the accident of where the day had put her, and Victoria walking out with a security guard. A respectful three steps behind her stopped when she saw her. For a moment, the two women just looked at each other. The CEO who tried to have her fired and the assistant who'd refused to lie, and Emily braced for cruelty, because cruelty was the only language Victoria had ever spoken to her.
But Victoria didn't have any cruelty left. She'd spent it all. What she had in that moment was something closer to bewilderment. You kept everything, Victoria said. It wasn't an accusation.
It was almost wonder. Two years. You were scared of me for 2 years and you still kept everything. I wasn't keeping it to hurt you, Emily said quietly. I was keeping it because I was afraid of exactly this.
I didn't want to be the person who helped. That's all it ever was. I just didn't want to be the person who helped. Victoria absorbed that. And then she said the closest thing to an apology she was capable of that day, which was not much, but was more than she'd managed to anyone in weeks.
You were better at this than I ever gave you credit for. I know, Emily said. Not cruel, just true. That was kind of the whole problem, Miss Hayes. And Victoria Hayes almost smiled a terrible, tired ghost of a smile.
And she got in the elevator and the doors closed. And Emily Ross stood alone in the hallway and discovered that she was crying and could not have said if you'd asked her whether it was from relief or from grief or from the plain human sorrow of watching someone lose everything, even someone who'd earned it. The news broke within the hour. Summit Dynamics removes CEO for cause. Board cites governance and conduct failures.
The stock which had been in free fall for 3 weeks did something strange and telling it ticked up 4% then six because the market which had punished Summit for the mystery rewarded it for the resolution. Removing Victoria didn't fix the hole in the balance sheet but it told every nervous investor and every wavering client the one thing they needed to hear that the company had finally decided to be a different kind of company. That the machine was being dismantled and not just repainted. By the end of the day, the board had named an interim CEO, and it was the obvious choice, the only choice, the person who had spent 3 weeks trying to save the company from the inside while its leader tried to burn it down to save herself. Laura Bennett.
Laura took the call from Coleman in her office at 6:00 p.m. And when he told her the board wanted her to step in, she was quiet for so long that Coleman thought the line had dropped. Laura, I'm here. She said, I'm just Richard. I sat in that room 3 weeks ago. I watched it happen.
I could have said something faster. I could have chased him down before he made the call. I could have Stop, Coleman said gently. Every one of us has a version of that sentence, Laura. Every single one.
The difference between you and the rest of us is that when it mattered, you're the one who stood up in that office and told Victoria to her face what she'd done. You called it out loud when it cost you something. That's why it's you. Not because you're clean, because you're honest. And honest is the only thing this company hasn't had at the top in a very long time.
Laura closed her eyes. I'll do it, she said. But I want it understood. I'm not taking this job to steady the ship and hand it to someone shinier in 6 months. If I take it, I take it to change the thing that made all of this possible all the way down.
The evaluations, the hiring, the culture, the language, all of it. I'll fix the balance sheet. Sure. But if I don't fix the reason we're here, then I'm just a nicer face on the same machine. And I won't do that.
Not after what I've seen. That, Coleman said, is exactly why the board wants you. Go be the CEO, Laura. Go build the company we all should have been building for 6 years. She hung up and she sat alone in her office, the new interim chief executive of a company in crisis.
And the first thing she did before the press strategy, before the client calls, before the balance sheet, was pick up the phone and dial an internal extension. Angela, it's Laura Bennett. I know it's late. Listen, I'm going to be running things for a while starting tonight. And the first thing, the very first thing I want to do before anything else is put you in charge of rebuilding procurement from the ground up.
All of it. Transparent scoring, published criteria, the whole framework. You saw it before any of us. You documented it when it was dangerous, too. I can't think of a single person more qualified to fix it than the person who was brave enough to prove it was broken.
A pause. Will you do it? On the other end, Angela Morris, who had spent four years quietly making herself smaller, writing phrases she was ashamed of absorbing a bias she hadn't chosen, began very softly to cry. Yes, she said. God, yes, I'll do it.
Good, Laura said. Because we've got a lot of hands to shake, Angela, and we've been leaving too many of them hanging for too long across the city. Nathan Carter got the news. The way he got most news. Quietly on his phone, standing at the kitchen counter while his daughter did her reading at the table.