With certain journalists, certain board members, the story he's constructing is that I've been making leadership decisions driven by personal instability that the Heartwell CL crisis was symptomatic of broader dysfunction in my management. He's not announcing this story. He's seeding it. By the time the board review is triggered, he wants people to already half believe it. So when you show up with a husband, they'll say you manufactured it to counter the review.
Yes. Which means the relationship has to be credible. History depth. People who know us who can speak to it authentically. She paused.
I know that's more than I outlined before. Darius absorbed this. How much history are we building? Enough that it doesn't look like a transaction, a beat, which means spending time together in public with people around us in ways that Reed is real because she stopped because they are real, he said quietly. She looked at him.
I was going to say because they need to appear real. I know what you were going to say. He held her gaze. I'm saying something different. The silence that followed was different from the ones before it.
Quer more honest. Victoria looked away first. I'll have my council draft the formal agreement tomorrow. Send it to me directly. I'll review it myself.
You're not going to have a lawyer look at it? I'll look at it. I know how to read a contract. He picked up his jacket. One more thing.
She raised her eyebrows. Amara is going to know something is happening. She's seven and she's smarter than most adults I know. I'm not going to lie to her. I'll manage what she understands and how.
But I need you to meet her before any of this becomes public because I will not allow my daughter to find out she has a stepmother from a news alert. Victoria was very still. You want me to meet her? I need to know who you are with a child in the room. Darius said, "Not the CEO, not the strategy.
You something cracked open in Victoria's expression briefly just for a moment before the control came back, but he saw it. The longing that lived inside the isolation, the hunger for something ordinary and genuine that no amount of power could manufacture. "Okay," she said softly. "Saturday," he said. "She likes the farmers market.