But I had just spent a year cleaning up what that training costs when it is indulged, and I had the ledgers to prove the price of it, and in the end ledgers are an argument that even a skeptical board cannot talk its way around for long.

“We have had presence,” I told them.

“Presence nearly sank us.

I would like to try substance for a while.”

They came around.

They always do, once the numbers start agreeing with you.

Chapter 18 — Fourteen Months On

Fourteen months after the blue light of the Halcyon ballroom, I sat at my mother’s old mahogany desk on the forty-second floor of Keystone’s offices, looking out over the harbor, reading the final Q3 performance audit for Cardinal Systems.