Simone Price, Adrienne's chief of staff, sat beside him with her tablet. She was younger than David, quick enough to finish his sentences and wise enough rarely to do it. "We also completed the reference calls. Three senior partners spoke highly of Margot Whitfield, and the management team presents well. If the board approves the final documents, we can close on the scheduled date."
Adrienne turned the top page of the folder without looking down. "What do we actually know about Margot Whitfield?" David paused. "We know she built a company from fourteen vehicles into a multistate operation. We know her financial controls are stronger than they were five years ago. We know the market believes she's effective."
"I know the numbers," Adrienne said. "I'm asking about the person." Simone exchanged a glance with David. Adrienne had asked similar questions in previous deals, but never this close to a ninety-million-dollar decision. She was a private investor rather than the sort of celebrity founder who appeared on magazine covers, and she had developed a reputation for turning away lucrative opportunities when the underlying leadership felt unstable. Still, that reputation did not make her immune to the pressure of a deal everyone expected her to approve.
"Three references described her as demanding but fair," Simone offered. "Another said she gets difficult when projects fall behind schedule, but that's not unusual for a founder."
"Fair to whom?" Adrienne asked. "The executives who can renew contracts for her? The people who can take money away from her? Or the drivers, dispatchers, cleaning crews, and passengers who have no leverage at all?"
David closed his laptop partway. "Those are harder questions to answer from a data room."
"That's why I'm asking them now." Adrienne leaned back and looked across the city. "If we invest, our capital will help her hire hundreds of people and place thousands of passengers in vehicles operated under her policies. Her behavior becomes a risk we share. Ninety million dollars is a very expensive way to discover that someone doesn't understand the difference between authority and permission to be cruel."
Simone made a note. "Do you want another round of management interviews?" "Not interviews," Adrienne said. "People are on their best behavior during interviews. I want to know how she treats someone she thinks cannot do a thing for her."
Adrienne was forty-eight years old, and the desire to ask that question had not come from a business textbook. She had grown up in a two-bedroom apartment outside St. Louis, with a mother who worked in a hospital laundry room and a father who repaired municipal buses. Money had been tight enough that a broken refrigerator could ruin a month, but her parents believed good manners were an obligation that cost nothing. Her mother had insisted that Adrienne thank the cashier at the grocery store just as carefully as she thanked a school principal.
One summer, when Adrienne was thirteen, her father had taken her to a hotel downtown while he attended a transportation meeting. They arrived early and sat in the lobby, where a man in an expensive suit mistook her father for a maintenance worker and ordered him to carry a suitcase upstairs. Her father explained that he was a guest, but the man repeated the order with the irritated confidence of someone who had never expected to be corrected. Adrienne remembered how the receptionist saw everything and continued typing, pretending the conversation was not happening.
Her father had not raised his voice. He had shown the man his room key, wished him a good afternoon, and taken Adrienne to lunch across the street. She had been furious on his behalf, but he told her something that stayed with her long after his hands stopped smelling of engine oil. "When a person thinks they know your value by looking at your clothes, they're telling you about their eyesight, not your worth."