Damian said, "I'd prefer not to speculate further until the full investigation is complete." But yes, Adrien Cole, her most trusted executive, the man she had promoted over 12 other candidates. The man who had sat in her office every Monday morning for 6 years and told her what was working and what wasn't and what to worry about and what to ignore. He told me the quarterly losses were structural, she said quietly. Not to the room, maybe to herself. He told you what he needed you to believe, Damen said.
The conference room had become very still outside the floor to siling windows. The city continued traffic and steal and 10,000 ordinary transactions happening simultaneously, indifferent to the conversation 42 floors above it. But inside this room, the morning had condensed into something precise and weightless. Victoria looked at the report for a long time. Then she said, "Without looking up, why would you tell me this?
You own the company. You could have just what?" Damen said, "Walked in and fired everyone and restructured, sold off the assets, let it collapse while the executives protected themselves. And 17,000 people found out on a Tuesday morning that their company was gone. She looked up. I'm not interested in destruction, he said.
I never was. He looked at his folder. I lost a company once. Not like this, but I know what it feels like to build something and watch it disappear. I know what it does to the people who believed in it.
He was quiet for a moment. I bought this company to save it, he said. The people in it, the ones who come in every day and do honest work and have no idea that the ground under them has been eroding for 3 years. Those are the people I'm here for," Victoria asked him toward the end of the meeting. A question that she asked carefully with the precision of someone who had been choosing her words with much greater care in the last hour than she had in the last decade.
"The money," she said, downstairs, "I want to. It's handled, he said. I want to apologize, she said. I know, he said. Not because of, she started, then stopped.
Chose again. Not because of what I found out about you this morning. Because of what I did before I knew any of it, he looked at her. That doesn't help the people you do it to when they're not the founder of an investment company, he said. Not harshly as a fact.
That's the part that matters. She sat with that. The attorneys on both sides were quiet. "I know," she said. "Finally." I know.
The meeting concluded at 5 minutes 4. Damian took the elevator down alone. In the lobby, the afternoon shift had begun. Different faces behind the reception desk. The marble floor was clear.