It was already done.

That was the part Lucan could not get his mind around, I think — not the fact of my ownership, which was shocking enough, but the fact that it was already finished.

He kept looking around the ballroom as though there were still a play to be made, a person to appeal to, a lever to pull.

There wasn’t.

He had walked into that party believing he was minutes from being named president, and the truth was that the decision had been made hours earlier, in a conference room he hadn’t been in, by a board that had already seen the folder.

Everything he was experiencing as a live crisis was in fact the aftermath of a decision that was over before he arrived.