The shareholder meeting was scheduled for a Friday morning three weeks after Desmond filed his proxy challenge, and I spent the preceding three weeks watching Julian do something I hadn't fully believed he was capable of a month earlier — fight for his company without once asking me to disappear from view to make the fighting easier.
He called every major shareholder himself, no delegated calls, no scripted talking points from Marcus standing between him and the actual conversation, and I sat in on several of them at his request, present in the room while he answered hard, personal questions about his judgment, his son, his relationship with me, without flinching from any of them the way I imagined the old version of him — the one from the first dinner, controlled and armored and always t
