A few nights later she asked him whether Lily was frightened. Daniel said she was mostly annoyed because someone had referred to her father as a corporate whistleblower when she knew he spent his mornings looking at trucks. Victoria smiled, then grew serious.
"Did I pull you into something you didn't ask for?" she asked.
"You gave me a job. I found a problem while doing it. The problem was already there."
"That's not entirely an answer."
"Then here's the rest. You made a mistake with my first interview. You've corrected more than one mistake since. But please don't decide what my daughter and I need without asking us."
Victoria nodded slowly. The words recalled their first meeting, the canceled appointment, and her assumption that she could repair the harm with a larger opportunity. She had been accustomed to solving problems by moving resources. Daniel kept reminding her that people were not resources that could be shifted without consequence.
Three days after Richard's arrest, she asked Daniel to come to her office. A cream envelope lay on her desk beside a letter she had typed and not yet signed. The room was quiet, and the photograph of her father had been moved from the wall to the bookshelf, where she could see it without feeling watched by it.
"I've written something," she said.
Daniel glanced at the heading. "A resignation letter?"
"Yes."
He looked at her, waiting. Outside the windows, the city moved through another ordinary working day. Victoria had spent her life expecting difficult decisions to arrive in the form of urgent deadlines. This decision had arrived in silence, after the urgent thing was over.
"I've been trying to become my father," she said. "I finally realized I don't want his job the way he had it. I don't want to be the person everyone fears disappointing. I want to build something different."
Daniel did not tell her to stay. He did not tell her to leave. He pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down, because the question of what came next deserved something more serious than instinctive reassurance. Daniel read the first paragraph of Victoria's resignation letter and set it back on the desk.
The language was professional and carefully constructed. It described an orderly transition, the company's need for stability, and the responsibilities of the board. It said nothing about a daughter who had refused to answer her father's last telephone call because she was too busy, or about the guilt of discovering that he had been trying to expose a betrayal before he died.
"Have you shown this to the board?" Daniel asked.
"Not yet."
"Then it's still a choice, not a decision."
Victoria looked at him. "I thought you'd be pleased. You said the company needed to change."
"It does. That isn't the same as saying you need to leave."