The Chen meeting was on a Tuesday.

She had prepared for it the way she prepared for things that mattered, thoroughly, specifically, in the particular and specific manner of a woman who understood that preparation was not anxiety but its opposite, that the particular and specific act of knowing a thing completely was what allowed you to be calm in the presence of it. She had read everything available on Eleanor Chen, the board biography, the public interviews, the three papers she had written on corporate governance in the early part of her career, the particular and specific pattern of her votes over six years on the Blackwood board. She...