I didn’t sleep on Friday night.
Not because I was anxious, exactly. More because my brain had decided that three in the
morning was the optimal time to lay everything out flat and look at it all at once, and once
it started there was no stopping it. I knew this feeling. I had felt it before, in the early years
of Bennett Capital, when a deal was close enough to almost touch and my mind refused to
let go of it until it had turned every angle to the light. The difference now was that what I
was trying to see clearly was not a deal.
It was eighteen years of someone else’s plan that I had walked into without knowing it existed.
I got up at two forty-seven. I made tea I didn’t drink. The suite was quiet in the particular
way of hotel rooms at night, that sealed, insulated quiet that ha
