Page 24 of Wells

"This."

She glances up from her laptop. She's perched on the edge of the table in the corner of my workspace, one leg crossed over the other, her pen tapping against her notebook.

"What about it?"

"It's too lean. The leadership will read this and have no clue what kind of risk we are talking about."

"The point is to summarize where the risk is, not run them through every single detail. That's what the visual is showing."

"How can they understand it is interconnected if we don't spell all of it out?"

She sets the pen down and leans forward, her eyes narrowing on the screen. I see a tiny peek of the line where her breasts meet.

"That's the beauty of what we're doing. If I show the connections the way you mapped them, the slide becomes a hairball. No one will understand it."

"They should understand that a breach in one tier cascades."

"They will. Look at the footer annotation."

I scroll down. The text is there, small and precise. Interdependencies detailed in Appendix C.

"They won't read the appendix."

"Then they don't belong on your leadership council. That is their job."

My jaw tightens, and I stop myself from smiling. She doesn't blink, doesn't soften the line. I've worked with her long enough now to know she actually means it.

"The executives need the information in front of them to make decisions every day, not get buried in supplemental materials. You're the one who manages the risks and handles them. My job is to make them feel like they are aware of what's going on. This accomplishes all of that."

"Hmmm," I say, not revealing that she has a point I'm not ready to concede.

"If I map every connection on the slide, they'll tune out before they get to the second point. And then they feel out of the loop and frustrated and possibly make decisions not fully informed. Ridge brought up this point specifically."

She's right, and that bothers me more than it should. I lean back in my chair and study the chart again. The structure is sound, and the hierarchy is clear now that she explains it.

I should let it go. Instead, I scroll to the next slide.

"This one. You buried the Jakarta flag under the regional summary."

Cera tilts her head, and her wavy brown hair shifts over her shoulder. The movement catches the light from the window, and for a second I lose the thread of what I was saying.

"The Jakarta flag is a secondary finding. It doesn't warrant top-level real estate."

"It's a port we route twenty percent of our Southeast Asia volume through. If that vulnerability gets exploited, it's not secondary."

"The slide shows regional risk. Jakarta is part of that region."

Her tone doesn't shift, but her eyes do. There's a challenge there. She's testing how far she can push me, and when she just has to acquiesce to my demands.

I drum my fingers against the desk. "You're saying I need to carry Jakarta verbally."

"I'm saying the slide does its job. You do yours."

Heat flares low in my chest, and I'm not sure if it's irritation or something else. My fingers pause over the keyboard. I scroll back to the cluster map and stare at it longer than I need to.

"Fine. Let's see if they receive it your way better. If it turns out they need more info, then we regroup on how we present this at our weekly Zoom meetings."

"I think that's the right call."