Damian had, by then, become something I would not have predicted on the night he stopped breathing in the ballroom: a footnote.

He had wanted so badly to be the story of Cardinal Systems.

He had spent his whole career arranging to be the name people said.

And in the end his name survived at the company only as a cautionary example, taught in the compliance seminars every new executive now sat through — a case study in unchecked hubris and weak internal controls, a thing that happened once and must never happen again.

The engineers who had once feared him did not speak of him at all.