Madden's stroke changed the texture of things at Carter Group in ways that were not immediately visible but gradually became clear.
He had always been at the center of the company's direction. Not always vocally, he was not a man who needed to be the loudest in the room, but his presence was a gravitational force. When that presence was suddenly circumscribed, when he was told to reduce his hours and his stress and his travel, the question of who held the center became real.
Kade handled it the way he handled everything. He widened his own scope quietly and absorbed what needed absorbing without making a production of it. But I watched him and I saw the weight of it in the way he sat at the end of the day, the particular set of his shoulders when he thought I wasn't looking.
One evening
