The air left Rodrigo’s lungs so audibly that the cousin standing next to him visibly flinched.
“What board?” he asked. I walked to the table and set a folder on it. A document folder.
Our firm’s branding on the cover. “Your family’s board,” I said. I have replayed this moment in my mind many times since, and I want to describe it accurately, because accuracy is the thing I owe myself here.
It was not triumphant in the way movies make such moments look triumphant. There was no swelling music. My hands were not raised.
I was standing very still at the head of my own table, on the terrace of my mother’s house, in the sunlight coming off the lake, while thirty-two people looked at me with expressions that covered the full spectrum from confusion to dawning alarm. “For two years,” I said, “the Cortez Group has had an anonymous investor. Someone who purchased your secondary debt and negotiated your forbearance agreement with the bank.
