The board meeting was on Tuesday at nine.
Roman lost the thread at nine twenty-two.
Hartwell was mid-sentence about Q3 projections and Roman was looking at the numbers on the page in front of him and they were not moving through him the way numbers normally did. He found the right column a beat too late. By the time he had it, Hartwell had already redirected the room's attention to the slide on the far wall, covering the pause so cleanly that if you were not watching Roman specifically you would not have caught it.
Everyone had been watching Roman specifically.
He knew because of the way nobody looked at him directly for the next four minutes. The careful, collective attention of a room that has noticed something and decided not to name it.
He pulled himself back. Finished the meeting
