Victoria appreciated the distinction because Isaiah had once taught it to her the hard way. During an acquisition several years earlier, their team had been tempted to terminate a director whose name appeared on suspicious invoices. Further review showed he had opposed the underlying payments, but the objection had been omitted from the summary. They avoided a wrongful decision only because a paralegal found the original email chain before the board vote. Isaiah had apologized to the director and then changed the team's investigation procedures.
"Margaret will support a proper review," Victoria said. "Philip may, too, if he can be separated from Charles long enough to answer questions."
"He had opportunities to speak," Isaiah replied. "So did the board. Buying the company doesn't make us innocent of what happens next. It gives us responsibility to correct what we discover."
He ended the call and went to the kitchen. His apartment was spacious now, with large windows and beautiful furniture that he rarely thought about, but the mug he selected was plain white ceramic. It came from the first office Apex had rented, and its handle had a small chip his assistant had once offered to replace. Isaiah kept it because some objects were useful precisely for what they reminded him of.
He called his mother before bed. Lena was seventy now, retired from cleaning offices and living in an apartment she had reluctantly allowed him to buy for her near the park. She answered on the third ring and asked if he was eating properly. Isaiah laughed and said he had been to a dinner where people paid extraordinary amounts of money to leave most of the food untouched.
"Then you should have come here," Lena said. "I made stew."
He told her, without naming the company or dramatizing the event, that a powerful man had spent the evening talking to him as though he did not belong at a table. His mother was quiet for a moment. "Did you tell him who you were?" she asked.
"Not until I left."
"And did it change anything?"
"It changed what he'll be thinking about tonight."
Lena considered that. "Don't let his embarrassment become the most important part," she said. "If you're buying the place, you're buying all the people who depend on it. The person who cleans the floor still has to go to work in the morning, no matter what happens to the fellow at the top."
Isaiah leaned against the kitchen counter and closed his eyes. His mother had a way of reducing complicated situations to their unavoidable moral center without pretending the complications were imaginary. He told her he understood, and she answered that understanding was a start but she preferred seeing what people did. Then she reminded him to sleep.
At two fifteen in the morning, Margaret opened her laptop at home and began gathering the questions she wanted answered before the first post-closing board session. Her husband brought her tea and asked whether the acquisition had become more difficult than expected. She said the acquisition itself was nearly complete, but the people involved were beginning to make the transaction feel like a test of whether anyone at Meridian remembered what fiduciary duty meant.