The employee bonuses Flynn had canceled while he furnished his mistress’s apartment were restored, with back pay.

Retirement matching, which he had quietly cut, went back to six percent.

The board established an employee hardship fund and, without my asking, put my father’s name on it.

And a respected physician-executive — a real one, chosen through a real search, with no marriage to me and no shell companies behind her — took the permanent chief executive’s chair, while I remained where I belonged, as chair of the board.

I worked, that year, from an office that held only one object I had brought from home: my father’s battered brass compass, the one he had carried since before the company existed, its needle still swinging true to north on the corner of my desk.