And he never mentioned that the quiet wife who preferred charity work had grown up at that company’s kitchen-table board meetings, had learned its bylaws the way other children learn nursery rhymes, and had, as a young woman, sat beside her father and helped him write the emergency governance provisions that were about to end her husband’s career.

I had let Flynn become chief executive.

That was my doing, and I have never pretended otherwise.

When my father was dying he asked me who should run the company, and I said Flynn, because I loved him and because I believed, with the whole of my heart, that ambition and integrity could live inside the same man.

My father, who was a better reader of people than I was, said only that we would see.

I have thought about that answer a great deal since. We would see. He had given me the tools to protect the company precisely because he was not certain I would never need them.