A pause which means he needs to move on you make you look like you don't know what you're talking about or that you're not an objective source personal Marcus said he already has been. She said the text the early calls to our general counsel he was trying to undercut you as a source before you became one. That's not a financial calculation. That's someone who remembers Phoenix and knows which pressure points are there. Marcus was quiet for a moment.
He was thinking about something that had been sitting wrong since Gail's call 3 weeks ago. A small asymmetry he hadn't been able to place until now. He started making calls before my name was on the Cambria or chart. He said yes. Gail said she thought it started before you offered me the role.
That's correct. Which means he didn't move because I took the job. He kept his voice level. He moved because someone pulled the Phoenix file. A long pause.
Different from the others. Yes, she said that was you. He said you pulled the file. He found out or he saw the discovery records get accessed or someone in his network flagged it. And he responded by going after the source of the file.
Yes, she said again. How long have you been building this case? The pause this time was the longest yet. 14 months, she said. Since I recognized the holding company structure in a vendor database during a different project, I saw Trident Pacific listed as a sub reference and I knew the name from financial filings I'd read years earlier.
I started pulling threads. Marcus stared at the eucalyptus in the side office parking lot, visible through the single window. It was moving in the offshore wind. He'd watched it a lot over the past month without registering that he was watching it. And you needed someone on Cambria who'd been inside the Phoenix situation, he said.
Who would know what to look for? Who would document it the right way? Yes. And who Fitch would come after when he saw the name, Marcus said. Because Fitch coming after me meant Fitch making moves, making calls, sending texts, getting on a recorded line he thought was private.
The eucalyptus moved. Marcus, she said. First time she'd used his first name in 6 months. He noticed it. I'm here.
He said the job was real. She said, "I need you to understand that you were the right person for the Cambria project independent of everything else. I would have offered you that role regardless, but the timing was chosen," he said. "Yes, and the risk was mine to carry without knowing I was carrying it." "Yes," she said. "And that was wrong.
I made a decision about your exposure without giving you the information to decide for yourself." I She stopped. I told myself that the documentation would be enough protection, that as long as you were building a clean file, Fitch couldn't touch you. I told myself the role was genuinely good for you, which it is, and that softened what I was actually doing. Marcus had heard a lot of apologies in his life. The ones from Phoenix, the careful ones from the company lawyers, the one from his ex-wife delivered at the kitchen table the morning she said she was done waiting for him to be the version of himself that the Phoenix situation had buried.