The board meeting fell apart on a Tuesday.
Not dramatically — not with raised voices or walkouts, not the cinematic collapse of something breaking in a visible direction. It fell apart in the specific, technical way that Atharva recognized as more dangerous than drama: the attrition of small disagreements, the accumulation of questions that would have been settled differently if the room's atmosphere were different, the particular quality of uncertainty that moved through men who had been watching him carefully for three days and had begun to read something in the watching.
He had been described, over the years, by various people who worked with him and for him and occasionally against him, as unreadable. He had cultivated this specifically. The unreadable quality was not natural — he fe
