I took the microphone.

My hands were steady.

I had spent twenty years in rooms where the numbers were enormous and the men across the table assumed I could not read them, and every hour of that had been preparing me, without my knowing it, for this one.

Every condescending meeting, every man who had explained my mother’s own firm to me across a table, every time I had been asked to take notes in a room where I owned the largest position — all of it had been, though I had experienced it as insult, a kind of training.

I had learned to be calm while being underestimated, and calm-while-underestimated is the single most useful state there is, because it is the one your opponent never thinks to defend against.