Flynn did not ask people to talk.

Flynn issued instructions and expected them carried out.

The pleading register of we need to talk was the sound of a man who had just discovered, at forty-one years old, that there existed at least one situation on earth he could not buy, bully, or sign his way out of.

He had built his whole life on the belief that everything, in the end, had a price he could pay, and that anyone could be managed, discarded, or replaced.

He was about to learn the one thing that belief had never let him see: that some things, once done, simply cannot be undone with any amount of money — and that the woman he had discarded in a hallway had been, all along, the one holding the only lever that mattered.