I hate that woman.
I hate her specifically, not in a general way, not in a "this situation is unfortunate" way. I hate her the way you hate something that had a choice and chose wrong anyway, every time, for years, and called it journalism.
She's talking right now. She's been talking for... I don't know how long and I don't want to. A while. And everyone in this room is keeping their face straight and I genuinely cannot tell if that's professionalism or cowardice or if those are the same thing in a suit.
Does anybody in here understand the actual harm she's done? The kind that lands on a person and stays there. Or is it just corporate talking; the language of liability and coverage and managed narrative, nobody actually saying what they mean because what they mean doesn't have a line in the budget.
Silas is nodding. Of course Silas is nodding. Silas has been nodding since 2019 and the thing Silas is nodding at is never the person, it's always the number behind the person. The purse. The deal. The projected revenue of a human being.
I don't know how you sit across from someone for years and never once think — wait, how is he. Not the brand. Him. How is he.
Isa I can't read. I've been trying since the beginning and I still can't tell. There's something in her face that could be genuine and could be very good performance and I don't know which one and that bothers me more than Silas because at least Silas I understand. Mediocrity is legible. Whatever Isa is doing is not.
Delaney is still talking. She hasn't looked at me once.
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I'm thinking about after the Marseille fight. We were in the corridor and he was still coming down from it and I said something about the third round, something specific, something about an uppercut he should have thrown, and I used the correct terminology because I know the correct terminology, I learned it from a Roblox game but that is not the point. And he stopped and looked at me and said — dude. Why didn't you become a boxer.
And I said, do you think my dad would have accepted me going around all shirtless? And he laughed. And I laughed. And that was a real moment, that was an actual moment between two actual people, and now he's gone and Delaney is in a room talking about him like he's a file she's been building and I'm supposed to keep my face straight?
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I like cats. I don't own a cat but I like looking at the photos of the cats my friends send me. There's something about a cat that just... it doesn't perform. It's exactly what it is. All the way through.
I respect that more than most things in this room right now.
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يَا مُقَلِّبَ الْقُلُوبِ ثَبِّتْ قَلْبِي عَلَى دِينِكَ
O Turner of hearts, make my heart firm upon Your religion.
It arrives without me deciding to think it. It just comes. Especially in rooms like this one. Especially when the thing being turned over and over is something I was supposed to protect and didn't.
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I like joking around.
I'm not joking right now.
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Delaney has not looked at him once in forty minutes.
This is not an accident. She is precise about where her attention goes and where it doesn't. She has looked at Silas, who nods. She has looked at Isa, whose face gives nothing. She has looked at the documents and the margins and the name nobody says aloud.
She has not looked at him. The absence is its own statement.
He understands it. He sits with it. His hands are flat on the table, his face is straight, his faith is somewhere underneath all of it holding the floor steady the way foundations hold floors — invisibly, without being thanked, without being seen.
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At minute forty-one she turns.
Not to the room. To him. Directly, for the first time; the full weight of her attention arriving at once, which is not a small thing. Delaney's attention has mass. He has watched it land on other people in other rooms and he has seen what it does. Now it is on him and the room goes very quiet in the way rooms go quiet when something is about to be named.
"Wasn't that your job to protect him?"
She says it calmly. The journalist's voice; factual, sequential, almost gentle. The kind of calm that knows exactly what it is doing.
She is not asking because she doesn't know the answer. She is asking because she wants him to say it out loud, in this room, in front of everyone.
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The room waits.
He looks at her. He does not look away. There is something in his face that is not performance and not collapse; something that simply receives the question and holds it without flinching, the way you hold something true that costs you, because it is true and because looking away would cost more.
He says nothing.
His lips move, once, briefly; something without sound, something addressed somewhere the room cannot follow. Then still. His hands flat on the table. The joke, as always, right there.
As always, unused.
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يَا مُقَلِّبَ الْقُلُوبِ
> Chapter complete. يَا مُقَلِّبَ الْقُلُوبِ Continue to Chapter 45? [Y/N]