What that someone had not counted on was Greg.

He could have taken the money; it was more than a junior analyst makes in months, and the request was framed to sound almost harmless.

Instead he declined it, and then he did the thing that mattered most: he preserved the record of the approach, and he walked it straight up to executive management rather than pretending it had never happened.

I have thought often since about how much turned on that one young man’s ordinary decency, on a person most of the story never mentions choosing to do the right and slightly inconvenient thing.