knew about this, didn’t you? You’ve all known about this for a while now.”
“The information didn’t come to us all at once, as I’m sure you can imagine,” Ryan said. “The first pregnancy happened four months ago.”
“And I wasn’t told,” Lucas said. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“It was decided that the best thing to do would be to keep the information from you,” Karen said.
“You had no right to do that,” Lucas said. “I’m the CEO of this company.”
“We were doing you a favor,” Jack said. “You’re too philosophical. You worry too much about ethics and not enough about profits. You wouldn’t have been able to do what needed to be done. So we left you out of the decision-making. You should really thank us for that.”
“Like hell,” Lucas said. “You have a responsibility to include me in every decision this company makes.”
“And what would you have done?” Jack demanded.
“I would have sent the drug for more testing four months ago,” Lucas said. “We wouldn’t have had to deal with this on the eve of the product’s release.”
“You would have sent it back again and again until it was perfect,” Jack said. “It would never go to market if we let you decide.”
“Drugs released to the public should be as close to perfect as they can possibly be,” Lucas said. “There’s no excuse for doing any less.”
“The decision was made to try to protect you,” Ryan said. “And you have to realize that, to a certain extent, it was necessary. When the first pregnancy happened, we weren’t sure the fault lay with us at all. It could have been user error.”
“And what about the second incident?” Lucas asked.
“That was two months ago,” Ryan said.
“And that didn’t suggest a pattern to you? Something that needed to be looked into further?”
Ryan sighed. “You know, Lucas…it occurs to me that if the experiences of the test subjects were that important to you, you would have followed up on them yourself. There was nothing stopping you from looking into how our tests were going. There was nothing stopping you from staying in contact with the test subjects.”
Ryan was right, and Lucas knew it. He could have had all this information if he had bothered to get it. Instead, he had depended on his board of directors, hoping that they would stay on top of things.
He knew what his father would have to say about that.
“But you knew I was using Androcyl,” he said. “You knew I was part of the test. Didn’t that make you think it was important to tell me what was going on?”
“It was still highly successful,” Jack said. “And you’re not married. Not in a relationship. We discussed it, but ultimately we all thought that if you did find yourself in a situation where birth control was needed, your odds were already very good of avoiding pregnancy.”
“Yeah?” Lucas said. “And how do you feel about that conclusion now?”
Karen waved a hand at them. “We’re wasting time discussing what could have been,” she said. “We ought to be talking about what we’re going to do now.”
“I told you, Elise isn’t going to tell anybody,” Lucas said, his voice strained.
“I’m more concerned about whether you’re going to tell anybody, to be honest,” Karen said. “The problem is that our other test subjects were low-profile individuals, and they signed nondisclosure agreements before participating in the trial, so they can’t talk about their results. But you didn’t sign any agreement. In fact, you gave an interview just last month where you talked about Androcyl.”
She tapped a few keys on her computer, then turned it so that the rest of the board members could see the interview she was referring to. “And in this interview, you mentioned that you were taking it.”
“Which means that if news of this pregnancy gets out, it will only be a matter of time before some journalist puts two and two together and realizes that the drug failed in your case,” Ryan said.
“Then send your press release out,” Lucas said. Much as he didn’t want that press release out there for the world to see, if it would end this conversation, perhaps it was worth it. “You came up with a good enough lie. Put in that thing about me being on allergy medicine and send it out. Problem solved, right?”
“I wish it were that easy,” Ryan said. “You know it won’t be, though. We have competitors who will be only too eager to exploit any weaknesses in our company. They’ll