Chapter 19
Ruth’s message had come in the night before, a short email to Alexandra’s personal inbox.
Can you give me thirty minutes tomorrow at ten?
My office. Nothing else, not even a subject line.
In the time she’d spent as her general counsel, Ruth had asked for private meetings only a handful of times, and they were always worth the interruption.
Alexandra had cleared the slot before turning off the light for bed.
By seven the next morning, she had already been at her desk for an hour.
By eight, she had answered the morning’s correspondence on the coastal road, and by nine, the Roosevelt Elementary paperwork had been signed and returned to Helen for processing.
The upcoming meeting with Ruth sat in the back of her mind all morning.
Paula Hollander called her a quarter past nine about her March renewal.
She was a careful woman who ran a distribution warehouse in the south valley, and she spent the first two minutes of the call telling her that she wasn’t worried, though her tone suggested she was.
Alexandra reassured her that the takeover wouldn’t affect her contract terms. There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line, and Alexandra held her breath, waiting for a potential fallout.
But Paula said, “All right, Alexandra,” thanked her, then said goodbye.
Alexandra sat with the phone in her hand after the line went dead.
Paula had believed her. She had given her word in good faith, but Alexandra couldn’t help but worry about what she would learn in Ruth’s office in forty-five minutes and whether or not the new information would change those terms. She set down the phone.
She turned her attention to the computer and wrote three paragraphs of a memo to herself, annotating thoughts on the sustainability division’s positioning.
She devoted more concentration to the individual sentences than she normally did, especially for a memo only she would see—typing and retyping words and rearranging clauses, occupying her mind with the small problem of making a dull paragraph less dull.
At nine-fifty, she saved the file and closed it. She sat for a moment with her hands flat on the desk, letting herself finally look at the ten o’clock slot she had kept at the edge of her attention since the night before. Then she stood and reached for her suit jacket.
The walk to Ruth’s office was forty-two steps. She had counted it once, years ago. The number resurfaced in her memory as she walked down the hallway. One, two, three, four. Counting was a discipline that steadied her mind, and she had been relying on it for decades.
When she reached the end of the hallway, Ruth’s door was closed. Through the side glass pane, Alexandra saw Ruth sitting at the desk reading the monitor with a small frown. She knocked once and let herself in.
“Alexandra, good. Close the door.” Ruth set a manila folder on the desk.
She crossed the office and sat, her gaze flicking to the folder.
“It’s internal,” Ruth began without preamble. “The irregularities I flagged in November, I’ve been following and tracking them. I have what I need to piece it together, and I want to walk you through it before I tell you what it adds up to.”
“All right.” So someone is sabotaging me from within. Alexandra kept her face and posture still, not wanting to betray her thoughts.
Ruth opened the folder and turned it on the desk so it faced Alexandra, then sat back in her chair. Alexandra appreciated the space to absorb the information.
The first page was a communications map; Alexandra recognized the format from the annual compliance. It had the usual distribution: heavy around her own office, dense around Meg’s and Ruth’s, and thick around the divisional heads. It looked normal.
Ruth pointed to a thin line of activity in the lower quadrant. “This is the working-group channel.”
Alexandra looked at it. She hadn’t thought about the channel in years.
IT built it over a decade ago, and its purpose was to let strategic ideas circulate before they were committed to paper.
She had approved the idea on Meg’s recommendation, back when she still trusted Meg’s instincts over her own.
“Look at the timestamps.”
Alexandra pulled the map closer. The activity clustered in the four months before each quarterly board meeting. Three or four bursts a year, six weeks at a time. The most recent had ended eight days before the board meeting on Tuesday.
Tension coiled in her stomach as Ruth turned the page. There were two sets of numbers laid side by side, both projecting the sustainable energy division’s costs and returns over the next five years. They drew from the same underlying data, but they weren’t the same projection.
One emphasized growth and momentum, which was the case Alexandra had been making to the board for a year. The other emphasized risk and cost, which made the case for slowing down. The raw numbers, though, were identical, but someone had used them to tell two different stories.
Alexandra had only seen the first projection. She had presented from it at the September board meeting. She had never seen the second.
“This one came to my desk,” she said and pointed at the first projection. “But what about the other one?”
“It was sent to five board members, routed through the working-group channel as preparatory reading and marked as supplementary. It wasn’t formally distributed, so it was never logged in the minutes.”
Alexandra withdrew her hand back to the edge of the desk and pressed it flat. “Who sent it?”
Ruth turned the page. The third sheet showed who had been using the channel and how often. There were a handful of names, and one of them was sending more than three times what the others were. Vivian.
“How long has she been doing this?” Alexandra asked, keeping her voice level.
“The earliest set of doctored projections I could place with certainty is from May. I’m still reconstructing the spring, and the pattern stabilizes in July.”
“Has she been working with Simone?”
“No. She’s had no direct contact with Rousseau Global. No documents ever left the building, and there was no money trail. I checked three times.”
Alexandra was quiet. She had been certain that whoever it was had been bought. It had been a comforting sentence—an opponent with a price had a strategy, and a strategy could be understood then countered. But Vivian hadn’t been bought. It had to be something else.
Through the wall, she heard a phone ring then get picked up before the second trill could finish. Someone laughed once, a short, unnatural sound to Alexandra’s ears, and then a drawer closed.
“My working theory,” Ruth said, “is that she’s been shaping what the board sees and hears since last spring.
She hasn’t been lying, exactly, just being selective about who sees what.
The members who wavered in November weren’t surprised by what they heard in the presentation because they had been reading versions of it for months. ”
Alexandra nodded. “What are our options?”
“Internally, we can fire her for cause and pursue a civil case. Externally, though, you’ll want to think about how much becomes public and when it surfaces. The board needs to know, but I want a day to consider the SEC disclosure. Dealing with the press is your call.”
“What does the timeline look like?”
“I can have the full file to you by one. About the conversation with her, I’d suggest tomorrow but you could choose today if you want it.”
Tomorrow was the sensible answer. It would give her the rest of the day to pore over the file, to think, and to walk into the conversation as prepared as she could be. It would also mean spending another day under the same roof as Vivian, and Alexandra knew she wouldn't last.
“Today,” Alexandra decided. “In the small conference room, not my office, at two o’clock. Just us two and Vivian.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll send her a note from my line to discuss a routine matter, fifteen minutes.” Alexandra stood and walked through the door, closing it softly behind her.
Helen was sitting at her desk and glanced up as she passed.
Alexandra returned the small professional smile and was grateful she had maintained composure.
Walking back down the hallway, she let herself think about the September presentation.
Vivian had stood at the head of the conference table in a blue blouse, presenting the sustainability initiative with easy command.
Afterward, Vivian had walked out alongside Meg, and the two of them had laughed about something at the threshold.
Alexandra had watched them go and was pleased.
Alexandra had chosen Vivian because she was excellent at the work. It was the standard her mother had used to build the company and what Alexandra had inherited without ever questioning whether or not it was the right metric to use. Excellence was measurable, though. Loyalty wasn’t.
Alexandra reached her own door, and Helen looked up at her again.
“Hold my morning,” Alexandra said. “I’ll need the small conference room at two for an off-the-books meeting.”
“Done.”
Alexandra stepped inside her office and closed the door behind her.
It felt strange that everything was the same as she had left it an hour ago.
The chair, the desk, the stack of papers waiting for her—all of it was unchanged.
What had changed, though, was the unsettling feeling that she could no longer say with certainty who else inside this building knew or had helped Vivian or had simply looked the other way.
Alexandra worked at her desk through the morning.
She answered messages, approved the supplier renewals Helen had stacked in her queue, and made two short calls about the Sustainability Summit follow-up, giving answers without remembering, afterward, what either call had been about specifically.
Her competence was running on autopilot.