“You didn’t build this company, Conrad,” he said.

“Yasmin’s father built this company.

You were handed the wheel because we trusted you to honor his legacy and respect his daughter.

You failed at both.”

It was the truest sentence spoken in that room, and I watched it hit Conrad harder than the audit had, because it took from him the one story he had always told himself.

Conrad’s entire identity rested on the belief that he was a self-made man — that the company was his achievement, his genius, his empire, and that everyone around him, my father included, had merely been fortunate to stand near his light.