The two hundred and ten thousand dollars was the company’s business — was, in fact, the shareholders’ money, some of it mine, moved through a shell company to house the woman who had assaulted a shareholder in the executive suite.

That was no longer a marital matter or a personnel matter.

It was a fiduciary breach with a paper trail, laid out in a forensic auditor’s dispassionate prose, and every director in that room understood that to vote for Conrad now was to make themselves complicit in it.

My father used to say that the beauty of good governance is that it does not require anyone to be brave; it only requires them to read.

I had not needed to persuade that board of anything.

I had only needed to put the documents in front of them and let the numbers do what numbers do.