I was not being loved for myself. I was running an assessment on a man who had not been told he was a candidate, and I was going to keep running it until he failed, and on the seventh of November, 2025, he failed it in front of two hundred people and I had the evidence ready.
He is responsible for the champagne. Entirely. Nobody made that man do that.
But I had spent six years waiting for something like it, and when it came, part of me — and I have made myself write this sentence four times before I would keep it — part of me was relieved.
The eleven months, laid out, because “I did nothing” is too comfortable a way to put it.
The nineteenth of March, 2024: I read the paragraph at my own kitchen table at about eleven at night and then I closed the laptop and went up to bed.
