Eggs. The good kind. There's only one kind. Scrambled is not the good kind, Daddy. Scrambled is the only kind I make.
That's the problem. She handed his coffee back, slid off the chair, and went to get her backpack over her shoulder. Saturday, can we go to the farmers market? Jaylen's mom said they have the strawberries now. Darius went very still for exactly 1 second.
Then, yeah, Saturday works. He didn't say anything else about Saturday. He made the eggs scrambled because that was the kind he made and got Amara to school and drove to the office and sat at his desk at 8:03 and waited. His phone rang at 8:07. I need you to come upstairs, Victoria said.
No greeting, no preamble. The voice of someone who had also not slept and was past the point of performing composure. Now, please. He was in the elevator in 90 seconds. Kalista was not at her desk outside Victoria's office.
The outer office was empty. The door was closed. Darius knocked once and opened it. Victoria was standing at her desk, not sitting, with three stacks of documents spread in front of her and a fourth in her hand. There was a man sitting in the chair across from the desk 60 silver-haired with the practiced stillness of someone who spent his life in rooms where very bad news was delivered.
He stood when Darius entered and extended a hand. James Whitfield, general counsel. Darius Coleman. He shook the hand and looked at Victoria. Tell me.
Victoria set down the document. Voss isn't just using the clause. She said he's been building something alongside it. For the past 8 months, someone inside this company has been feeding him financial data. Specifically, data from the operations and revenue reporting system.
She met his eyes. Manipulated data. Reports that show systematic mismanagement under my leadership. Ghost contracts, inflated vendor invoices, budget discrepancies that don't exist in the actual operating records but appear very convincingly in a parallel set of documents that have been constructed to look official. Darius didn't move.
Someone inside the company built a fake financial record. A complete shadow record, James said quietly, detailed enough to survive initial scrutiny. Designed to be presented to the board as evidence of executive misconduct during the leadership review, which means the clause isn't even the real weapon, Darius said. No, Victoria said the clause gets the review triggered. The fabricated financial record is what actually removes me.