"Ask."
"If you could go back — if you could do it again — would you do it differently? Knowing what I went through. Knowing the eleven days and the team and the email. Would you find another way?"
He was quiet for a very long time. Long enough that she knew he was not managing the answer — he was actually looking for it.
"I don't know," he said finally. "The ED case was airtight. Mehra was going to be swept up and anyone in his capital structure was going to be implicated. I believe I made the only decision available to me with the information I had." A pause. "But I also know that 'the only decision available' is often a story people tell themselves when the real decision is 'the only decision I knew how to make.' And those are different things. I might have had options I didn't see because I wasn't built to see them."
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"I've been practising," he said, and it was so dry and so real at the same time that she laughed — a real laugh, sudden and short, the kind that surprised her out of the difficult conversation like a window opening.
He looked at her when she laughed. The way he had looked at her that first time, in the pitch room, when she'd said something sharp and he had looked startled and then like he wanted to be in the room for whatever came next.
"Zara." His voice was different. Quieter. Something underneath the control and the precision was speaking now. "I am trying to tell you, badly, that what happened to PayAxis was the worst professional decision of my life not because it was incorrect by the available information but because it cost you something that should have been yours, and that cost matters to me in a way that goes well beyond professional responsibility. And I am telling you this because you asked me to learn the kind of conversation I wasn't built for, and this is me learning it, right now, in real time, and it is — it is not comfortable."
