"Please tell me there's another Darien Cole," she said at last. Jenny had never heard her voice sound so thin. "There isn't," she replied. "I've checked the appointment, the email domain, and the firm's website. He was our guest, and he told you exactly who he was."
Victoria stood so abruptly that her chair rolled backward. She remembered how he had held out his hand, how she had refused to touch it, and how confidently she had ordered the guards to escort him outside. Her face became hot. She reached for her telephone, pulled up the business card she had never bothered to read, and called him.
The call went unanswered. She left a message about a terrible misunderstanding and an opportunity to reschedule. Then she called again, and when that call also went unanswered, she summoned Marcus. He entered carrying a quarterly report and stopped when he saw the color of her face.
"What happened?" he asked. Victoria showed him the photograph and described the morning in the most forgiving language she could assemble. Marcus interrupted when she said the man had been improperly dressed. "You had Darien Cole removed from the Four Seasons?" he asked. "He presented himself as the investor? With his name?"
"I didn't recognize him," she replied. Marcus put down the report and looked at her as if he were seeing a problem much larger than the funding round. "He didn't need you to recognize him," Marcus said. "You could have asked Jenny. You could have looked at the invitation. You could have treated him like a person without knowing anything at all about his financial position."
Victoria's eyes filled with angry tears, but Marcus refused to soften the point. He had watched colleagues absorb the consequences of her assumptions for years. He had pleaded for training, promotion reviews, and better procedures. Now a man with the power to rescue the company had received the same treatment in a public lobby, and there was no private committee where Victoria could suppress the complaint.
"Can we fix it?" she asked. Marcus glanced at the cash report still lying on the desk. "We can apologize," he said. "We can also start examining why it happened. Whether he'll invest afterward is his decision, and you need to understand that he owes us nothing."
Victoria wrote an email that called the incident confusing. Marcus read the draft and shook his head. "You aren't describing what you did," he said. "You're describing something that happened to you, like bad weather." She deleted the sentence and wrote a more direct apology, then hesitated before sending it. She wondered whether naming her own prejudice in writing might create a document that lawyers could use against her later.