A private marital matter. I have thought about the audacity of that phrase, offered to a room of shareholders about a situation in which the executive’s mistress had assaulted a shareholder in the executive suite and been housed with shareholder money.

Conrad genuinely believed it might work — believed that if he framed the whole thing as a domestic squabble, a hysterical wife and an unstable employee, the men in that room would nod and look away and let him manage it privately, the way they had let him manage everything else.

And for most of his career, that instinct had served him.

Powerful men are permitted an astonishing amount of private mess, so long as the machine keeps running and the quarterly numbers keep climbing; the people around them develop a talent for not seeing.

Conrad had built his life on that talent, on the reliable willingness of others to call his misconduct a private matter and leave it alone.

What he had not reckoned with was that the moment he reached into the company’s accounts, he had converted his private matter into everyone’s matter — had made it, specifically, the board’s legal liability and my documented grievance.