I wrote it on the fourth day.

It was two paragraphs, it used the phrase “a private family matter,” and Priya Raghunathan read it and said, “Absolutely not,” and I asked why and she said, “Because by Friday there will be nine versions of this and yours will be the least interesting one.”

The second attempt was to say nothing, which I did for about three weeks, during which exactly what she predicted happened.

Four hundred and thirty people knew that the chief executive had missed the biggest closing of his career, that there had been an incident in a boardroom involving children, that a lawyer the company had used since 1994 was suddenly not being used, and that Bernadette Achterberg, who had been on the twenty-second floor for fourteen years, had gone.