Chapter 13: The Ordinary Authority
The months that followed the final letters required no additional filings and produced no further approaches.
I attended the executive committee as a matter of course. The operational knowledge I had built from the lower floors sat beside the authority of the trusts without friction. People who had once known me only as an exacting assistant adjusted to the continuous fact of my presence at both levels; those who had learned my position after the cathedral simply treated the structure as settled. My father remained chairman. I did not accelerate any public realignment of the shares. The twelve percent stayed visible. The fifty-one percent stayed secured. The combination was already sufficient to ensure that no future attempt to simplify my holdings through marriage, pressure, or narrative could find a gap.
