"That's a nice line," she said. "Did you practice it in the car?"
He laughed in spite of himself, then stopped, because she wasn't laughing.
"When you were eight," she said, "and that Hennessy boy called you a name on the bus, you didn't hit him. You found out where his mother worked and wrote her a letter in your best handwriting and mailed it with my stamps. You were always going to be the kind of man who wins by being right. That's not nothing. But it's a temptation too. Being right at somebody is its own kind of meanness, if you keep it up long enough." She leaned in. "Don't you go in there and make yourself that woman's lesson. You'll spend your whole life teaching people like her and never get to do your own work. And don't let Douglas Brandt hand you her head on a plate so he can keep his. I knew Douglas when he was thirty, and he was already looking for somebody to stand behind."
Nathaniel took out his phone and showed her the email that had arrived at 5:40, subject line Handling this morning's situation, a draft resignation attached and a note: Getting ahead of this — no need for you to be involved. D. His mother read it at arm's length and handed it back.
"There it is," she said. "Thirty-some years, and the man hasn't changed his cologne."
"Firing her would be the easiest thing I do all year," he said.
"And what would it mean?"
He made himself answer honestly. "That I'm powerful now. That it costs something to do that to me. Not to anybody. To me."
"Mm-hm," said his mother.
So he told her the other thing — what his analysts had pulled at four o'clock, when on a hunch he'd asked them to start the file review with client relations. Five years of declined prospects. Nineteen had been Black- or Latino-owned. Fourteen of those nineteen had been flagged from Lindsay Corrigan's desk for "additional diligence": personal financial statements from founders, three years of audited financials from companies with four years of history, extra rounds of references. Requests that appeared nowhere in the files of comparable white-owned prospects. Most of the fourteen had simply stopped calling. People get tired of proving themselves. You can decline someone without ever saying no.
"So it wasn't one sentence," Eunice said.