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Caladon.
    “He’s out this week,” Teresa said. “On vacation.”
    Brian winced; Wilcox shook his head. Vacation was a sensitive topic with Wilcox, anyone’s vacation; he didn’t believe in them. And it was a particularly sensitive subject today. Wilcox had wanted to postpone today’s meeting until Monday, but Brian stated he’d be unavailable because he was taking a long-planned, although short, vacation.
    Surprisingly, Wilcox had shrugged off the scheduling conflict during a phone call with Brian. “You probably deserve it,” he said. “We’ll come up as planned on Friday.”
    You bet he deserved the vacation. Although sometimes Brian wondered what was the point. In the end you didn’t work any less or reduce your stress. He’d put in almost double time trying to pull this presentation together the last few weeks, missing dinner with his family almost every night and weekend outings to the pool. And when he got back from vacation, even if he stayed in touch through e-mail and voice mail while gone, he’d be in deep weeds again.
    But in this case the vacation days would be worth the price he’d pay at work. If ever he needed time with Gwen, he needed it now. With the hours he’d been working, it was like he and Gwen were living in separate, parallel worlds, catching glimpses of each other but rarely connecting. He understood now the old phrase about two ships passing in the night. This would be Brian’s first time off in over a year and also the first time they’d spend more than a weekend at the lake house. They’d hardly gotten to enjoy it: a fully furnished custom house with a wraparound porch on Tear Lake, close to the road on one side, but with 150 feet of lakefront and a dock on the other. It was a luxurious second home with tall tinted windows and a view of America’s wilderness. The crazy thing is that between the stock and the bonus, paying for it wasn’t that much of a stretch. What a windfall the acquisition hadbeen, with Brian the first to admit that luck, and not just ambition and hard work, had played a big role in his financial situation today.
    He had started his career at Pherogenix, a start-up drug company that had been fishing medical schools to fill positions and found Brian in his fourth year. Stephen Jeffries recruited hard, offering to help pay down his school loans as a kind of signing bonus. At first Brian resisted; he had visions of becoming an MD and working a few years in war and poverty zones, making a difference for the underprivileged before settling into private practice. He’d scratched and clawed his way through four years of medical school—if he gave it up and joined Pherogenix he’d not complete his residency and never get licensed.
    Then everything changed. Gwen got pregnant and Brian realized the difference he wanted to make in people’s lives was actually in one life: Gwen’s. He accepted a good salary and what he considered a boatload of stock from Pherogenix to help coordinate clinical trials for their new antianxiety drug, Zuprone. He was too busy to think about medical school again, and he never looked back. Seven years later, Caladon Pharmaceuticals grabbed Pherogenix when Zuprone showed potential. Since then Brian had been tracking data and surveying physicians who prescribed Zuprone. He’d been the first to notice the trend in off-label prescribing for weight loss. And while it was illegal for a manufacturer to promote a drug for off-label use, Wilcox jumped on the market opportunity and recruited Brian to educate more physicians and Caladon’s sales reps about the latest in obesity treatments, including Zuprone and its full range of therapeutic benefits.
    Business case aside, Brian’s role in the advancement of Zuprone was a key reason he favored the FDA application. The focus would turn to new clinical trials and the drug approval processwhile taking any attention away from Caladon’s marketing practices on behalf of Zuprone. Brian executed that