Leverage

“I need to ask you something that isn’t in my scope of work. I’m asking it anyway because it will be in someone else’s.” Imogen Kapoor said it without looking up from the ledger spread across the conference table — the same walnut table where Nora had first confronted Cal about Southline, though Kapoor had rearranged the room within an hour of arriving: chairs squared, folders stacked by date rather than whatever order Desmond had left them in. “How would you characterize your relationship with the chief executive of the company whose largest undisclosed liability you are about to help quantify?”

“Did Lena ask you to put that question to me directly, or did you arrive at it yourself?”

“Both, in a sense. Ms. Whitfield mentioned, before I opened a file, that she’d raised an independence concern at a prior board meeting and hadn’t been fully satisfied by the answer.”…