She expected me to be managed.

For forty-four years, her certainty had been the strongest force in my life, and it had always, in the end, bent me into line.

It did not bend me this time.

Something in me had come loose in the last ten minutes and would never be reattached, and in its place was a clarity so cold and so total that it frightened even me.

I lifted my phone, and I called my executive team, the same team I had told an hour earlier to start the board meeting without me.

“Cancel the Baltimore acquisition,” I said.