Preston did not answer directly. He began describing the company's complicated year-end liquidity forecast, but Eleanor asked him to return to the question. The exchange was professional and unhurried. Nobody needed to raise a voice for the room to see the problem.
The strongest evidence came from the September correspondence. Celia projected Preston's warning that the proposed use of the certificate inventory could create wage and financial-reporting exposure. Beneath it appeared Grant's eleven-word reply: USE IT ANYWAY. WE NEED THE QUARTER CLEAN. The corporate secretary read the original messages into the record after confirming their dates and the accounts from which they had been sent.
Grant sat motionless for several seconds. Then he said he had expected finance to design a lawful solution once he approved the general concept. Celia asked whether any message showed him requesting compliance confirmation before the rollout. There was none in the retained correspondence. His position remained an explanation he was entitled to give, but it was no longer a fact the board could assume.
Preston opened his binder and turned to a printout. "I raised the risk," he said. "I didn't hide it."
"You also implemented the entries," Eleanor replied. "Both things matter."
The finance chief's face tightened. For years he had succeeded by speaking in absolutes and letting other people carry the uncertainty. The board was now doing something he found unfamiliar: holding more than one person responsible for different parts of the same decision, without requiring a single villain to explain every failure.
Dana's testimony came later in the morning. She spoke quietly and referred to the dated memoranda in front of her rather than to the embarrassment she had felt in the breakroom. She confirmed that she had advised against paying earned wages with third-party store instruments until the company obtained adequate legal and payroll review. She acknowledged that she had not escalated to the audit committee when management proceeded without resolving the issue.
"I told myself the final responsibility belonged to finance and the CEO," she said. "That was comfortable. It was also wrong. I was responsible for employee welfare in my role, and I stopped pressing after the first refusal."
One director asked whether Grant had made any remarks about how employees were likely to respond. Dana turned a page in her notes. She had written down a sentence from a November discussion because it had disturbed her enough that she did not trust herself to remember it accurately. When she expressed concern that people might object to noncash pay, Grant had told her, "Employees will take whatever keeps their jobs."
The board chair asked Dana to repeat the sentence. Dana did. Nobody answered immediately. Outside the conference room, office printers whirred and phones rang, ordinary sounds continuing while the meaning of those words settled over the table.
Grant said the remark had been taken out of context. Dana agreed that she could not reproduce the entire conversation word for word but explained that her contemporaneous note recorded exactly what she had heard. Celia added that the timing and participants matched calendar entries. The note was evidence of what had been reported, not a recording, and the board would weigh it accordingly.