WESLEY
The numbers on my screen had stopped making sense twenty minutes ago.
I was staring at the same quarterly projection I had been staring at since morning, and the figures were all where they were supposed to be, laid out in neat columns that told a straightforward story, but my brain refused to engage with any of it. I would read a line, reach the end of it, and realize I had retained nothing, and then I would start again from the beginning with the same result.
I pushed back from the desk and rubbed my face with both hands.
Natalia Carson was the problem. Specifically, the way she had sat at the head of that boardroom table and taken my proposal apart question by question with the focused precision of someone who had been running companies for years rather than weeks. She hadn'
