The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide — the one where she was giving Tom credit for the framework he'd "led on." He'd stepped in on it last month, when the person who'd actually built it had been reassigned to something less visible. The actual person was watching from the third chair on the left. He had stopped making faces about it in week three. He watched the slide. He let Tom have his moment, again. He would not, when asked later, bring it up, because bringing it up would make him the person who brought it up. That was part of the arrangement too.
