The Vote

The emergency board session was called for 9 a.m. the next morning, and the agenda item, when it finally landed in Naomi's inbox at 8:40, was worded with the kind of careful blandness that meant somebody had lawyered every syllable.

REVIEW OF EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP STABILITY.

"They're not reviewing stability," Naomi said, reading it twice in the elevator. "They're reviewing whether to remove me before I can present anything."

Imogen caught her in the hallway outside the boardroom, gripping her arm a beat too hard. "Naomi, listen to me. I didn't call this."

"Then who did?"

"Three board members Warrick still golfs with." Imogen's voice dropped. "I've had doubts about that contract for over a year. I raised it once, quietly, and I was told to let it go, that Warrick had it handled, that pushing would look like I was undermining a legacy CEO on his way out the door. I let it go. That's on me." She met Naomi's eyes, and for the first time, Naomi saw something like fear in them, not for herself. "But I am not going to let you go down for asking the questions I should have asked a year ago."

"Then back me in there."

"I will. But Naomi — they may not give you the floor at all."

They did, eventually, after twenty minutes of procedural stalling that felt, to Naomi, like watching people rearrange furniture in a burning room. She stood at the head of the table with a folder of everything — the trust, the paternity record, the substandard materials, the falsified inspection, the buried incident report — and she had gotten exactly four sentences into it when the boardroom door opened without a knock.

Every head turned.

Warrick Stennis stepped inside, unhurried, in a suit as pressed as the day he'd retired, wearing the same easy smile he'd worn shaking Naomi's hand on her very first morning.

"Don't stop on my account," he said pleasantly, taking the nearest open chair like it had always been his. "I'd love to hear the rest."