And then Wendy called an emergency board meeting for ten o’clock that morning, to approve Luca’s rescue package — a package that would grant him warrants, voting control, and a primary lien on all of the company’s assets.

She genuinely believed, I think, that public humiliation would work — that faced with an official narrative of my own madness, I would crawl back to the table and sign whatever they put in front of me, just to make the shame stop.

It is an old, ugly, and remarkably effective playbook, the one Wendy reached for: when a woman exposes you, declare her hysterical.

Call her unstable.