He should not have gone to Damian's room at 6am.
He knew this.
Marcus would tell him this if he asked.
He hadn't asked.
He had made coffee.
Checked the time.
Done the calculation — the walk from his floor, the likely state of someone who had been awake since 3am, the window between early enough that it wouldn't seem planned and late enough that the coffee would still be warm when he knocked.
He had done all of that.
And then he had gone anyway.
Which meant he was either making a strategic decision he was choosing not to name, or he was losing a kind of control he had maintained without effort for his entire adult life.
He suspected it was the second one.
He found that more interesting than alarming.
That was the other problem.
The board meeting that morning was a financial review.
Numbers. Projections. The Singapore acquisition's second phase.
Kendrick was good at financial reviews.
He was good at everything that happened in board rooms.
