"Damn it, you're not listening to me." "Listen to me!" "It doesn't matter." "We can't wait for the report." "We're gonna issue the recall." "All of it!" "All right, Jace, fine." "Yeah, you think you need to protect your ass, that's fine." "Just call the Donaldsons and tell them it was my call, all right?" "Jesus." "Synchro:" "So., mpm" "Marie, is he off?" "All right, get me Burt." "I'm sorry about this." "It's bad enough I'm late, but..." "Burt?" "Yeah, Walter." "I'm sorry but they wouldn't let me use my phone until I cleared customs." "I can't reach the Donaldsons." "No, but we're gonna go ahead with the recall anyway." "I don't trust Jace on this." "No, or on anything else really." "Well, okay." "Good good, all right." "Marie'll set up a meeting at... 10:00 p.m." "Marie, did you get that last part?" "Good." "Okay, call Jace last." "Order food." "Any press, tell them that we're working on a statement." "No, give me 40 minutes." "No calls, all right?" "All right." "Thanks." "Oh, what?" "Yeah, I'll text Connie." "Oh, Jesus." "Do you need a moment, Walter?" "I'm not gone three days and all hell breaks loose." "You know, if it's an emergency, we can..." " We can reschedule." " We've already rescheduled." "I was supposed to be here at 6:00." "It's 8:00." "No, it's after 8:00." "I'm really sorry." "And I appreciate you're seeing me later." "I know you must have a life outside of here." "No, it's fine." "I had an hour free." "If you understood... if you really understood how loath I am to be late." "I'm really sorry." "This isn't me at all." "Really, it's fine." " Here." " What's this?" "It's for your time." " You're paying for the session in cash?" " No, it's not for the session." "I'll write a check for that." "This is..." "This is just something extra for you." "That's really not necessary, Walter." "Thank you." "Someone..." "Unimpeachable, huh?" "I like that." " What do you mean?" " I wasn't trying to bribe you." "I mean, I'm..." "That's not the way I operate." "Although, I tell you, sometimes it might be easier for me if I did." "I understand." "You were just trying to make up for lost hours." " I understand." " Exactly." "I know you value your time and I've wasted some of it." "It was generous of you to offer." "Thank you, Walter." " But I..." " Well, that's good." "You're a straight shooter." "That's a rare thing these days, someone who's dependable." "I had to come to a walk-up in Brooklyn to find it, but..." "Marie, I said no calls, for Christ's sake!" "Can't..." "Are you sure?" "That son of a bitch." "No, don't let him know that you've reached me." "Just let him think I'm walking into it." "I'll call you from the car." "Just give me a half hour of peace." "Can you do that?" "Unbelievable." "This little pisser..." "Jace!" "He's not even half my age and somehow he thinks he's gonna use this to bring me down." "He's so self-deluded he actually thinks they're gonna give him my job." " Walter, you seem..." " It's my own fault." "In a way." "I mean, he was very bright, eager, good schools." "I brought him into the company." "But he's green." "He's in over his head." "It's..." "Walter, can you listen to me for a moment?" "You seems like... you seem like you're in the midst of a breaking crisis here." "No, Paul, it's not breaking." "It's already broke." "We cull ingredients from all over the world:" "China," "Brazil, Indonesia." "Somehow something got into the pipeline." "Walter, whatever is going on... it could be contaminated milk powder or bacteria from one of the factories." "It could be a cheap lubricant leeching into the machinery..." "You don't seem like you're able to get away from this right now." "I think that it would be a very good idea for us to reschedule." "Reschedule?" "!" "When?" "It's not gonna get any better tomorrow or the day after." "Paul, I'm going into combat in an hour." "And if I..." "if I don't talk to you now, it might be another month before I get a chance." "It's off, okay?" "Both of them." " Can I get a glass of water?" " Sure." "I hate this stuff." "Connie's always telling me I should drink more of it." "So does my doctor, but I don't have time for it." "You don't have time to drink water?" "Sometimes no, I don't." "And this week, it's a good thing anyway, where I was." "You've been traveling?" "I spent the last 44 out of 72 hours in an airplane." "And the hours waiting for the six flights were no barrel of laughs either." "So the trip was in response to the..." "To the crisis." "What?" "Well, you were just saying how you have suppliers all over the world, and I assumed that you were trying to track down the source of the problem." "I wasn't flying for the company." " You weren't?" " No, I flew to Rwanda to get Natalie." "Did something happen to her?" "No, she didn't say so." "But I knew that she was in trouble." "So she didn't ask you to come?" "She didn't have to." "Look, Paul, she's... she's my daughter." "And until she went to Rwanda," "I had spoken with her every day of her life." "Wherever I was in the world," "I'd call her at bedtime and tell her I loved her." "Before she could talk," "I made these little clicking noises." "Then after she went to Rwanda, we emailed every day." "Suddenly," "Suddenly a week ago, she writes her mother but not me." "Connie doesn't do email so I had to print the letters out for her." "And she was asking Connie if I was all right, if the company was really complicit in this baby formula mess." "It was crazy talk." "Mightn't she have just been concerned for your welfare?" "Well, Paul, don't you think I know my own daughter?" "That's not what I'm saying, Walter." "I'm just trying to understand why, with your company in crisis, you would chose to visit your daughter in Rwanda." "The emails, her voice wasn't her voice." "She would never doubt her father." "Now I'm not saying she's being brainwashed, but I knew she was hiding something and once I got there I found out I was right." " What was she hiding?" " To start with, she cut all her hair off." "She'd always had this long auburn hair, like my mother's when she was that age." "Well, that's gone now." "Don't you think that's disturbing?" "I can see why you might find it so, yes." "But cutting hair, dyeing it weird colors, lopping it off even, I mean, that's what" "what daughters do." "What else was different about her?" "What was the same about her?" "I didn't know who I was talking to." "She had no shoes." "She had given them away, it turns out." "She was so thin." "She had this child in her arms... a little girl hanging in her arms like a sack of potatoes." "Are you okay, Walter?" "This is where she's living, Paul." "This is where my daughter has chosen to live... some hellhole near Goma." "When she saw you, how did she react?" "I don't think I spoke right away." "I just stood there looking at her." "Finally she got scared." "She said, "What is it?" "Mom?" "Is mom all right?"" "And I said, "Your mother's fine"." "She said, "What are you doing here?"" "And I said, "I've come to take you home." " "Get your stuff."" " And that didn't go down well?" "No." "At first she was... distant." ""Dad, I can't leave right now." "I have to finish a procedure."" "As if she'd got some medical degree in the last month." "She said she'd meet me for dinner in a few hours in the big tent." "Then she pointed in the direction of some little shacks in case I wanted to lie down." "She was living in one of those shacks." "They looked like outhouses and she was sleeping there." "I can see how upsetting that... that might have been for you." "I mean, you spent your life... providing a good home for her and... this is how she chooses to live." "So what happened at the dinner?" "Well, I didn't wait for dinner." "I went back into the shack and I took all her stuff and..." "I put it in the jeep." "I just..." "I just wanted to take it back with me to Kigali and at least have her clothes cleaned." "I wanted to go back to the hotel that night and... take her to dinner and maybe talk some sense into her." "The next thing I know, she's... tearing across this field, screaming at me insane stuff..." "How I'm trying to control her, how I don't respect her, how she's worked so hard to build up trust with these people and now... they're gonna think that she's some neocolonialist like me." "And there was something about Connie I'm not even going to repeat." "I swear to god, Paul, it took everything I had not to slap her." "Instead I just said, "Don't you ever speak about your mother like that"." "Then... she broke down and started to cry." "What did you do then?" "I put my arms around her." "I said, "Natalie, we're going home"." "And then... she told me to go fuck myself." "She'd never said anything like that to you before?" "She broke my heart, Paul." "She broke my heart." "Why do you think she was so angry with you?" "She made that pretty clear." "I got an email from her when I got back to the hotel." "It turns out that I'm domineering, obsessive, that I'm the cause of all her anxieties, that it's impossible to thrive or grow around me, and... that's why she had to go away and now I'm... ruining her only chance to free herself from me." "Now you see why I went over there?" "I sensed this was coming from earlier emails." "You know, hearing that email makes me..." "Can we talk about the way you... came in here today?" "Completely in charge on both phones, handing me your bag..." "Not quite like I was a bellhop, but... something like that." " I'm sorry if I offended you." " No, you didn't offend me." "But... it did catch my attention." "Walter, we both know that... you are... an excellent... manager." "World class." "Right?" "But in other roles where... you're not entirely in control, like say being a patient here, or... maybe when you went to see Natalie." "That's much less comfortable for you." "But what are you saying?" "I never try to control Natalie." " I gave her whatever she wanted." " Of course." "You've given her everything." "And that's..." "That's something that's hard for other parents to do but... not for you." "Do you think it's possible that... what's hard for you is... just..." "letting her be?" "Letting her go?" "Did you think that... you felt her pulling away from you in those emails?" "And then when you saw her at the camp did you... did you get frightened?" "Scared... of losing her so that you felt you had to tell her to pack up her things and come home?" "Can't a father worry about his own daughter?" "Of course he can." "But just look at... how you responded for a moment." "In the midst of a major work crisis, you read an email that she wrote to Connie and without stopping to think, you get on a plane and you fly halfway around the world." "It's all right." "These work pretty quick." "Xanax, it's..." "Dr. Wells gave me the prescription." "Thank God he did." "Otherwise I'd never have been able to... get out of that place." "Did you take a pill... after you saw Natalie?" "Later." "I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat." "I had a nightmare... that Natalie was gone." "Then I looked around me and with the... jetlag and the fatigue," "I had no idea where I was for a minute." "I thought I was..." "back in my parents' house, in Tommy's room, with all his sports trophies and awards." "I just couldn't stay in that room another second." "I had to get out of there." "I was having trouble breathing." "And then I remembered the pills." "Do you think it's strange that you were... that you were thinking about..." "Tommy over there... in Africa?" "He's been on my mind lately." "Do you know when that started?" "Has it been since Natalie left?" "You said that you woke up and you felt that you had to get out." "Hotels can be disorienting." "But losing Tommy was... very painful for you, wasn't it?" "My folks had the pain." "With all due respect, when parents lose a child it kills them." "It's really admirable that you remained so close to your parents after that happened." "Like with the Donaldsons, as you've said." "After their son James died, you became like a son to them." "The good son, the one everybody can depend on." "And then you had this dream." "And... you feel that you're suffocating in... in Tommy's room." "What does this have to do with Natalie?" "Maybe Natalie is trying to do something that you've never allowed yourself to do:" "to separate from her parents." "For you to stay connected means to never... stray." "Now Natalie is trying to do something in between, but you feel that she's abandoning you" "the way Tommy did." "He died, Paul." "Jesus." " He didn't abandon me." " I know." "But maybe that night in the hotel, Natalie's separation from you... felt, in some way," " it felt like a death." " God forbid." "There's no comparison." "There's a big difference." "When a child dies, he's gone." "Isn't that exactly the nightmare that woke you up, that Natalie was gone?" "It wasn't the same." "I was trying to find her." "I knew that no matter how bad I felt," "I had to put myself aside and think only of Natalie." "I took the pills." "And somehow it passed." "And..." "I dragged myself back to the hotel lobby and I went online in the business center." "That's when I read her emails and I realized..." "I realized..." "You realized what, Walter?" "It's okay to have the... thought here." "You can say whatever you like." "I realized that she didn't need me at all." "Or maybe that's just what she needs to feel right now." "She's done with her old man." "I'm a booster rocket." "She's launched, like your boys, isn't that what you said at our first session?" "Did I?" "I'm sure I also said that Natalie was different." "I'd have to agree with you." "You did raise her with the freedom to think for herself, to question authority figures, to confront the world of adults." "You gave her an incredible gift." "Now she wants to use it." " By telling me to go fuck myself?" " That's what you heard." "But before that, she wanted you to talk things over with her." " She invited you to dinner, no?" " She was just shining me on." "Possibly." "Or possibly she really wanted to talk to you." "But you felt like she was disrespecting you and you reacted to that." "You know, I think that... for her whole life she's been very aware of you and how you feel and what you think and what she can do to make you happy." "Maybe part of the reason she's so angry is because maybe for the first time in her life she knows that... what she wants..." "is not what you want." "And she's having a very hard time reconciling herself to that fact." "She's having a hard time?" "What about me?" " So how did you leave things with her?" " I didn't." "I woke up the next morning to a barrage of incoming faxes, phone calls, emails, outbreaks of diarrhea, children in hospitals possibly from formula contaminated at one of our plants." "I'd gotten out in front of this!" "I leave for a few days and... it's like they were just waiting for me to turn my back." "I'm sorry, Walter." "With the late session, I forgot to shut the..." "Hello, this is Mr. Barnett's assistant, Marie." "It's urgent that he speaks with Burt." "If he calls me, I can patch him through." "Back to battle stations." "I'd better be going." "Thank you." "26 messages." "Will you be all right?" "I'll be fine." "They can't get rid of me, Paul." "Après moi, le déluge." "After you, the flood?" "That's a lot of pressure." "The glue, Paul, the glue." "Just look what happened when I left." "I guess... my daughter can survive without me but... the Donaldsons can't." "Will I see you next week?" "Yeah, and thanks again." "You're welcome." "Call Burt and..." "What do you mean you can't get him?" "You just left me a message he wants to speak with me." "What about the old man?"