Sixty-eight thousand was more than I’d been earning at Morgan Freight. It was the highest salary I’d been offered in eighteen years of work.
I accepted without countering, which is a decision I made deliberately: the number was right and the role was right and sometimes you accept a thing that’s right.
I started the first week of December.
A Specific Family Conversation and Consequences
The consulting work at Morgan Freight concluded in early November. I delivered the remediation plan for the Alder account — a document covering the exception reconciliation, the protocol update, and a recommended ninety-day transition approach with a named operations lead — and I attended one session with Luke to walk through it.
Luke, to his credit, engaged seriously. He asked questions that were better than the ones he’d asked in our first handover session. He had, in six weeks of managing without me, developed a more specific understanding of what he hadn’t known. This is not nothing. Some people learn from that kind of feedback and some don’t. Luke appeared to be in the first category.
He said, at the end of the session, “The fourteen-page Alder section. I read it again.”
I said, “I know it’s a lot.”
He said, “I read it and then I went back and re-read the exception from Q3 that Diane flagged. I can see now exactly what happened.”
I said what happened was a routine exception that had a specific protocol that wasn’t followed, and that it wasn’t a catastrophic error.