Victor Hale read the press release three times.
Not because it was complicated.
It wasn't.
Walker Corporation Welcomes Damian Roberts as Temporary Consultant.
Twelve words.
Clean. Professional. Deliberately unremarkable.
Victor read it a fourth time.
His assistant stood near the door, waiting.
She had learned not to speak when he went quiet like this.
Most people went quiet because they were confused.
Victor went quiet because he was thinking.
Those were very different kinds of silence.
He set the press release down.
Picked up his coffee.
It had gone cold.
He drank it anyway.
On his screen, he had three windows open.
The press release in the center.
Damian Roberts' file on the left.
Walker Corporation's current board structure on the right.
He looked at all three.
Then he looked at Damian's file.
He had built it carefully over the past ten days.
It wasn't thick.
That was the first interesting thing about Damian Roberts.
