He turned down the dirty contracts.

He ate the smaller margins.

He used to tell me, when I was a girl doing my homework in the corner of his office, that a company is a promise a lot of people are keeping to each other at once, and that the whole thing is only worth anything as long as nobody breaks their part.

He died proud of what he’d made, and he left it to me, and I — dazzled, distracted, in love with a charming man — let that man take the wheel.

And Roman took the promise my father had spent forty years keeping and he broke every strand of it, quietly, from the inside, turning the pipeline that was supposed to carry medicine into a channel for washing stolen money, skimming from emergency hospital orders to buy a mistress pearls.