I understand your concern, but I can assure you our fundamentals have not changed in the last 24 hours. Victoria stopped, listened. Her jaw flexed. That's not No, no, that is not what happened. That's a distortion.
I'll tell you exactly what happened when we sit down. She listened again and something in her face slipped for just a second before she caught it. Fine, fine. I understand. We'll talk next week.
She set the phone down very gently, which was worse than slamming it. Who was that? Laura said. Hartwell group. Laura's stomach dropped.
The co-investors. They're reassessing. Victoria made the quotation marks with her voice bitter and thin. Do you know what they said to me? They and I quote, We tend to follow the Carter Fund's read on people.
On people, Laura, not numbers. People. As though Nathan Carter is some kind of some kind of oracle whose feelings were all supposed to genuflect to. Laura shut the office door behind her. Victoria, sit down.
I need you to hear me. And I need you to hear me as your friend, not your CFO. We are not friends. We're colleagues. The words hit Laura harder than she expected.
11 Years. 11 Years of late nights in airport lounges and holding this woman's company together through two recessions. And in one sentence, Victoria had told her exactly what she was worth. All right, Laura said quietly. As your colleague, then here's your situation.
Meridian just froze the bridge. Hartwell is reassessing, which means they're gone. They just haven't said it yet. That's two co-investors following Carter out the door, and there's a third, and we both know how the third moves. She set both hands on the desk.
By the end of the week, you will not have a funding round. You'll have a hole and the market will price that hole in and your stock will find out what a company is worth when the smart money runs from it. Then we find new money. There is no new money. Not this quarter.
Not with the Carter Fund's fingerprints on the exit. You don't understand what his name means to these people. When Carter says no, it's not a no about the terms. Everybody knows Carter never walks over terms. So when he walks, they all assume he saw something rotten.
And they don't wait to find out what. Victoria stood up so fast her chair rolled back and hit the credenza. Then I'll tell them what he saw. He saw a scheduling error and a woman who didn't roll out a red carpet for a man who deliberately disguised himself to test us. That's what he saw.
And when I explain it, you'll be explaining why you didn't shake his hand. Laura's voice was flat as a table. Do you hear how that sounds out loud? There is no version of that sentence that makes you look like anything but exactly what you were. Stop trying to build a story where you're the victim of a manipulation.
You're not the victim, Victoria. You're the reason. For a moment, one raw moment, something moved behind Victoria's eyes that might have been the beginning of understanding. And then the office door opened without a knock, and Emily Ross stood there white-faced, and the moment was gone. Ms. Hayes, the board is calling an emergency session.
2:00. Mr. Coleman's office sent it out. Mandatory attendance. Emily hesitated. And there's a reporter in the lobby from the journal asking for a comment about the Carter withdrawal.
Victoria seized on it like a drowning woman grabbing a rope. Good. Good. I'll give them a comment. I'll set the record straight.
No. Laura and Emily said at the exact same time. The two of them looked at each other surprised. No, Laura repeated. You will not talk to a reporter today, Emily.
Tell them no comment, thank them for their patience, and get them out of the building. Victoria, if you say one word to that reporter, you will hand them the rope they hang us with. She was already moving toward the door. I'm going to see Coleman before, too. Somebody in this company still needs to be trying to save it.
She walked out and Victoria stood alone in her office and for the first time she felt the walls of the thing she'd built beginning to lean inward. She did not go to the window. She did not sit down. She stood in the center of the room and did the only thing that had ever worked for her when she was afraid, which was to get angry instead. Because anger was a place she knew how to live and fear was not.
He did this to me, she told herself. A stranger walked into my building and destroyed 20 years of work because I hurt his ego. That's who the villain is here, not me. Him. She almost believed it.
Almost. By 11 that morning, four floors down, Angela Morris had stopped being able to pretend she hadn't seen what she'd seen. She had printed nothing. She was too smart for that. But she had spent 2 hours reading, and the reading had changed something in her that could not be unchanged.