He hung up. He looked at Maya, who was watching him with the focused attention of a 10-year-old who knows that a conversation just happened that she was not fully included in. What did she want? Maya said. She wanted me to talk to reporters about what?
About what happened at the company? Maya considered this. Are you going to not today? Why not? He sat down across from her because the story isn't finished yet and I don't like telling unfinished stories.
Maya nodded slowly with the air of someone filing this principle away for future use. What part is unfinished? She said he thought about Victoria about Marcus about 17,000 people and a technology platform and a board that had just voted unanimously for something it should have done years ago. He thought about Adrien Cole in a federal processing center and the particular complexity of the fact that brilliant man had decided to use his brilliance this way, not out of desperation, but out of appetite, the specific cold appetite of someone who had decided that the rules were for other people. Most of it, he said.
Victoria called at 9:15, not through an assistant, not through a communications team, directly from her personal line, the same number she had used 11 days ago when she called him after midnight to tell him the fraud was worse than he had shown her. "The board wants to make a public statement," she said. About the investigation, about the acquisition, about She paused about the circumstances of your first visit to the building. What kind of statement? Damian said the full kind.
No hedging. He said nothing, waiting for the part she hadn't said yet. I want to be the one to give it, she said. He let that sit for a moment. Why?
He said, because I was the one who, she stopped, started differently. Because a public problem deserves a public acknowledgement. And because the people in that lobby that morning deserve to hear it from the person responsible. Her voice was steady. And because I spent three days reading everything your team gave me and thinking about what kind of leader I've been.
And I think the honest answer is that I've been an effective one and an arrogant one. And that the arrogance was not separate from the effectiveness. It was threaded through it. And I'm responsible for that. Damian was quiet.
That's not an easy thing to say. He said, "No," she said. "It's also not optional. Not for me. He thought about the difference between an apology that comes because consequences have arrived and an apology that comes because a person has genuinely looked at something in themselves and decided they cannot continue without addressing it.