Internal Promotion — Strategic Planning Division: Stellan Brant elevated to Director, Strategic Planning, effective the first of next month. Please join us in congratulating...

The thing was, Stellan was fine. That was the precise word for it. He was fine. He processed data at a speed that most of her colleagues found impressive and that she found adequate. His projections were sound. His presentations were clean. He had a good handshake and a talent for explaining complicated analysis to people who didn't understand complicated analysis, and that was genuinely valuable, and Petra was not a person who dismissed genuine value. She'd been doing this job for eleven years. She understood the currency.

But she'd run the sector forecast that caught the Merin contract before anyone else was looking at it. She'd built the attribution model that the executive team had been quietly using for two years as if they'd invented it. Three times she'd been told she was on the short list for a director role. Three times the announcement had come with someone else's name.