James had been hired for one reason: he was exceptionally good at his work. In fact, that didn’t quite capture it. He was frighteningly good at it. The organization had been seeking someone with a distinctive mix of skills: artificial intelligence, information security, change management, and exceptional communication. On paper, the first two seemed most important, but they were wrong. The last two would determine whether James survived. His assignment sounded simple when it was described in a boardroom. There were nine territories, each run by a largely autonomous leadership team that had been doing things its own way for years. James was expected to persuade them to work together, pool resources, give up practices they had grown comfortable with, and hand over a significant amount of responsibility to a man much younger than most of them. In doing so, he was supposed to achieve what people far more senior than he was had been trying unsuccessfully for almost three years. Time was run...
Paula had been successful for as long as anyone could remember. She had won awards, sat on panels, and been quoted in the papers more often than almost any other woman in the city. Every year brought a new title, and someone was always standing to introduce her as brilliant, driven, and fearless. Sometimes she wondered who they were talking about. Nobody ever called her lonely. Nobody knew, and Paula would not have known how to say it anyway. Her father, Charles, talked about her constantly when he was home. When he wasn’t, he left gifts: bicycles, books, dresses, and toys no one else on the street had. As she got older, the gifts became tennis rackets, watches, holidays, and later the kind of doors that money and influence open without anyone hearing them creak. What Charles could not give was himself. His job moved him to a different continent every few weeks. He once told his wife, Katherine, that he felt like a foreigner in his own skin. He would wake at night, reach across the bed...