Marcus stared at the quarterly figures until the numbers stopped making sense as numbers at all and became something closer to a verdict.
Three major clients had quietly withdrawn since the scandal broke, citing scheduling conflicts and shifting priorities in emails so carefully worded they may as well have simply written the truth instead, we no longer wish to be associated with your family's name in the papers. The northern development deal, the one his father had spent two years courting patiently across a dozen dinners and a hundred careful phone calls, had stalled entirely, tied up now in the same public hesitation that seemed to be settling over every corner of Calloway Holdings at once, a slow rot no one wanted to name out loud.
He'd tried, the week before, reaching out to three s
