It was a lie, and everyone at that table knew it was a lie, and they had let him believe it for years because a confident chief executive is useful and the truth would only have bruised an ego they needed intact.

My father had built the company from a single warehouse and a rented truck.

He had handed Conrad a functioning empire and a capable board and a daughter, and Conrad had taken all three as his due and squandered them. You doubled the revenue, he had shouted, and it was even partly true — but you can double the revenue of a machine someone else built and still be, fundamentally, a man who was handed a machine.

Thaddeus said it plainly, without cruelty, the way you state a fact that has waited too long to be stated, and I saw Conrad understand that the people he had considered his admirers had known the truth about him all along.

That was the real ruin, I think — not the vote, not the escort out, but the moment he learned that his whole self-conception had been a courtesy others extended and had now, at last, withdrawn.

Chapter 21 — Every Hand