The Monday board meeting started at eight and Sera was in her chair at seven fifty-five.
Twelve men around the table. Most old enough to have known her father before she could walk. Two of them had tested her the first time she chaired, three months ago. Not loudly. The quiet kind of testing , speaking over her point, directing questions past her to Dante, framing decisions as things the family should consider rather than things she should decide. She had let it happen once. The second time she stopped the meeting, named it without drama, and moved on. There had not been a third time.
Today the meeting ran ninety minutes and she kept it exactly on schedule. When the Devlin numbers came up she presented them without notes. When one board member raised a concern about the Milan timeline, s
