I’m sorry.”
Three years earlier, I would have demanded consequences immediately.
Termination.
Legal review.
Public accountability.
But Evelyn had retired.
She was sixty-eight.
She could not return the lost years.
And the uncomfortable truth was that she had acted inside a culture I created.
I had repeatedly praised her for shielding me from “nonessential” matters.
I had told her, more than once, that if something did not affect quarterly performance, product strategy, investors, or regulators, I did not want to see it during expansion.
She had taken my instructions literally.
