Daniel turned the gate on its hinges, opened it fully, and let it swing back. The motion was smooth, and the latch settled neatly into place. He stepped aside so Catherine could test it herself. She pushed it with one hand, let it return, and then opened it again with an expression of genuine satisfaction.
"It's good," she said.
"It will hold."
"That's not exactly the same thing."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
Catherine stood with her hand on the gate. "You told me yesterday that people decide who belongs by looking at the outside of things. You were right. But you also said something about the shareholder vote. You asked whether everybody had already decided."
"Has everyone?"
"I don't know. My lawyers have been preparing for a defensive fight. Injunctions, disputes over notice, procedural objections. We're acting as if the board already owns the story."
"Do the shareholders know what the board intends to change?"
"They've received the summary."
"Is it the summary you would have written?"
Catherine looked at him. She had an answer before she spoke it. "No. It takes everything we've built and measures it by two weak quarters. It calls our workforce-retention contracts inefficient because the margins are lower, without showing that those contracts kept our biggest customers through the last downturn."
Daniel nodded. "Then maybe they need the complete picture before they vote."
"You sound like a shareholder activist."
"I sound like a man who spent four months arguing with an insurance company. They kept telling me a treatment was experimental. I gathered the medical records, matched them to the policy language, found the people who actually had authority to reconsider it, and kept asking until they looked at the facts."
"And they paid?"
"Eventually. After a lot of letters."
"What did you learn?"
"A big office can make you feel small, but every office has people who know how things are supposed to work. You have to find them, give them the right information, and keep the record straight."
Catherine began walking slowly along the fence. "I have six original shareholders who were with me before the institutional investors. Some are frustrated with the board, but I haven't called them. I've been trying to win through the lawyers."
"Do you trust them?"
"The original investors? More than most of the people sitting on the board now."
"Then ask what they think. They might be waiting for somebody to treat them like part of the decision."
She stopped beside the third post, the one that had looked sound until Daniel had tested its base. "James Whitmore was the second person who ever invested in me. He was sixty-two then. I haven't spoken to him properly in months."
"You could start there."
Catherine glanced at her phone. "Today?"
"Is there a reason to wait?"
She looked down at the screen and, for the first time since he'd met her, seemed to regard the device as a tool instead of a source of demands. "No," she said. "There isn't."