I can try, he said finally. That's the best I can offer. That's all I'm asking for, she said. The photograph appeared on a Thursday morning. Someone had caught them outside the workshop two weeks earlier.
Leona stepping through the side door in a wool coat. Nolan holding it open. Both of them mid-con conversation. The body language of two people who had stopped managing what they looked like around each other. It was not a compromising photograph in any meaningful sense, but it did not need to be.
The caption did the work. Orle CEO's new project. The broke single dad who couldn't ignore her billions. By Friday, it had 40,000 shares. By Monday, the follow-up pieces had located the vendor file, the missed payments, and the publicly registered debt on Reese Technical Services equipment loans.
The internet assembled its own story from the available materials, and the story it assembled was the one that fit the shape it already knew. Victor Kesler moved quickly. He had dinner with two members of Orleans's board on Monday evening, a dinner that had been scheduled before the photograph appeared, but whose agenda shifted considerably now that there was material to work with. He raised with appropriate expressions of concern the question of whether the CEO's personal relationship with a vendor might constitute a conflict of interest requiring formal review. He noted the subcontracting offer that had been routed through procurement and the timing of its origin.
He did not say anything technically false. He did not need to. By Tuesday, Leona had been notified that the board's finance committee was requesting documentation on all vendor relationships involving Ree technical services pending an independent review. A project approval she had been expecting to finalize by the end of the month was placed on hold. Nolan lost two clients in the same week.
One was a facilities manager who told him directly, at least he was direct, that the company had decided to consolidate vendors and he was no longer on the list. The other simply stopped returning calls. He had no way to prove the two things were connected, but the timing did not require proof. He had been in business long enough to know what a reputation shift felt like. Sadi came home from school on a Wednesday and set her backpack down and did not say anything for the first hour.
When he asked her if something had happened, she pulled out her phone and showed him a screenshot. It was a comment thread beneath one of the articles. He didn't read past the first few lines. "It's not true," he said. "I know," she said, "but Emily showed it to me in the lunch line.
He set the phone face down on the table." "I'm sorry," he said. "It's not your fault," Satie said. She picked up her backpack and went to her room and came back 20 minutes later and asked if he needed help with dinner, which was her way of saying she was all right. He said yes, and she stood next to him at the stove and they made pasta and did not talk about the article or Emily or the lunch line. And afterward she did her homework, and he sat with the account books and ran the numbers again in case they had somehow changed.