The financial adviser answered cautiously. "Management's forecasts were much lower than ours. Those forecasts relied on predicted customer losses and expenses that now appear unusually conservative. The differences may have legitimate explanations, but they need to be reconciled."
Victoria looked toward Marcus. "Did you build the forecasts?"
"My team did," he said. "Adrian gave us the legal risk assumptions."
"And who gave Adrian those assumptions?"
Marcus opened his mouth, then stopped. It was a familiar pattern. Every answer led to another department. Nobody had wanted to own a problem large enough to ruin the quarterly results, so each person had sent it to someone else.
That night Marcus returned to his office and opened the original working files for the service-division sale. He had reviewed hundreds of versions of the financial model. This time he looked at the timestamps instead of the totals. A crucial customer-retention assumption had been changed less than forty-eight hours before the initial Greybridge offer. The modification came from a shared executive workspace used by legal, finance, and strategy. The attached justification referred to a termination notice from a major customer.
Marcus searched for the notice. He found no signed termination letter, only an internal draft that had never been sent. He opened the customer relationship record and discovered that the customer had renewed its contract three weeks later. The renewal had not been reflected in the sale model.
His stomach tightened. He had approved the forecast. He had assured the board it was conservative and reliable. He had not checked the source of the assumption because Adrian said the renewal was uncertain and the transaction needed to move quickly.
He went to Victoria's office without an appointment. She was still there, surrounded by reports, a cup of tea cooling beside her keyboard.
"I need to tell you something," Marcus said.
Victoria looked up. "Can it wait?"
"No. I think I signed off on numbers that were manipulated."
The next hour changed his career. Marcus showed her the draft termination notice, the actual customer renewal, and the gap between the two versions of the model. Victoria asked the same questions Frances had asked him: who changed it, who verified it, who benefited? Marcus answered what he could and admitted what he could not. He no longer tried to make his uncertainty sound like expertise.
"I should have caught this," he said.
"Yes," Victoria replied.
He looked at her, startled by the directness.
"And I should have asked you to explain the model before telling everyone to sell," she continued. "We can spend the next year assigning blame in private. For now, we tell Frances. All of it."
Marcus hesitated. "Adrian is going to say we're panicking."
"Then let him say it to the independent committee."
The following morning, Greybridge's lawyers sent Hale Meridian a letter. They argued that suspending the sale had disrupted confidential negotiations and warned that any public allegations of impropriety could harm all parties. Adrian forwarded the letter to Victoria with an urgent recommendation to resolve the deal quickly. He also asked whether the board had considered Daniel Carter's conflicts of interest, noting that Northstar might benefit if the service division were retained and revalued.