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The Night the Chair Went Silent

What I Saw Between a Burned Doorway and a Governance Committee Table Governance Committee Meeting, 5:30 p.m., November 17, 2025, RIOC Operations Office, 680 Main Street

Eleanor Rivers

Dec 5

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The smoke had thinned by November seventeenth, but it still clung to my coat and the back of my throat. Two nights earlier, fire trucks had crowded the rear of the Landings, their lights bouncing off brick and glass. The flames were gone. The smell remained.

I carried it with me as I walked the corridor that evening, unsure where I belonged. Judy’s event had already begun nearby, and word had spread that Lydia Tang and Margie Smith were there. Their presence pulled at me, a familiar warmth from people who understood the weight of this island, while my neighbor’s door behind me still whispered loss.

I knew even then that Lydia was not someone who could be fooled by ceremony. She is one of us, shaped by the island’s sharper seasons. Not like David Krout, who once walked these halls with me like a brother only to vanish the moment a title settled on his shoulders. Titles can hollow people out; his made him feel untouchable until it didn’t. After he was off the board, he asked the community for help getting a laptop so he could stay connected, and the community, forgetful at times yet impossibly warm, made sure he had one.

It is the same community that gathered clothing for Justine’s daughter days earlier, even as PSD discarded the first pile and even as the building itself seemed intent on erasing her mother’s memory in record time. Tape removed. Door scrubbed. Absence absorbed. Names disappear quickly here. Some because of tragedy. Some because they are pushed aside.

Between Warmth and Duty

I stood in that hallway caught between two truths: the people and the institution. Between warmth and duty. Between following the chair I trusted or following the agenda I was expected to witness. After the fire, I found myself craving warmth more than certainty, and I knew I would not find any comfort in the belly of Motorgate. So I turned toward Judy’s gathering, toward Lydia’s steadiness, trusting that the Lighthouse would wait and that YouTube would keep the meeting for later.

Two gatherings on the same night. One held by people who had lost so much, the other held by an institution that had forgotten too much. I turned back toward my apartment in time to watch the meeting unfold, carrying with me the uneasy sense that the building had whispered a truth I was only beginning to understand.

The Empty Chair

The Governance Committee meeting opened with clean angles and tidy frames. Meghan Anderson announced the recording. Marc Jonas Block slipped his coat out of view. BJ Jones sat with practiced calm. And at the head of the table, hands folded, was Conway Ekpo, composed and entirely at ease.

It took less than a minute to notice what was different.

A chair at the table sat occupied, yet empty in the way that mattered. The seat where Lydia Tang should have been. No one asked about her absence. No one explained it. The meeting simply moved forward as though her year and a half of work had been a brief experiment in reform that had already expired.

If the empty chair unsettled you too, pass this on. Some truths travel farther when we carry them together.

Conway set the agenda with the confidence of someone who knew the room would follow. Four old documents, untouched for decades. He had reviewed them, annotated them, prepared them. And the others, three lawyers, a CFO, a CEO, and a new board member, fell into an easy synchrony, as if the rehearsal had happened elsewhere. I watched Conway run that meeting so smoothly I wanted to check if he had a teleprompter hidden under the table.

I could not help but think of Lydia’s drafts, delayed and questioned and contorted through months of objections. How every step she took had required explanation. How every sentence had been treated like a breach of etiquette. Outside experts demanded, then dismissed. Every sentence treated like a breach of etiquette.

Yet here, without her, resistance dissolved.

Policies advanced in minutes. Language changed with soft nods. Oversight shifted without debate. Even the difficult questions, executive time commitments, salary visibility, procurement authority, slid across the table as though friction had been quietly lifted. By the time they approved the second policy, I wanted to ask if they planned to marry it too, because no one gets through real commitment that fast.

The Sidelined Voice

The first real shift came when they reached the procurement policy. Dhru walked the committee through the process the way a careful person does, steady but unadorned. Marc asked whether the board-approval threshold had changed. She explained it was still one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars and mentioned past discussions about lowering it to ninety, though nothing came of it. Before the idea had any room, Conway moved the meeting forward, the thought of tightening oversight left behind.

He pivoted to the section on procurement violations. The language placed investigations with the CFO. Dhru said yes, she handled it and involved legal when needed. Conway replied, “sure, sure,” with a softness that dismissed the substance more than the words. Then he offered the alternative: perhaps legal should investigate instead. Dhru tried to hold her ground, but her explanation wandered, and BJ stepped in to support Conway’s move following the structures used at Battery Park.

Conway typed while they spoke: “Lada/Suzanne to check whether the statute required legal to take over”. Harmless on the surface, but the direction was unmistakable. Later, when Dhru tried to offer guidance on investment risk, pointing out that state mutual funds carried more risk than federal ones, Conway nodded without absorbing the point. He read instead from a long, polished sentence about ESG considerations he had written beforehand. No one questioned it. Meghan had nothing to add. The moment when Dhru had spoken had already passed.

Watching from home, I could feel the imbalance. Conway and BJ moved with a quiet, practiced understanding, their exchanges almost too smooth to be accidental. The collaboration was so coordinated I wondered if Beyoncé had choreographed it, as I half expected someone to bring out pom-poms. Dhru was present, yet standing at the edge of their circle, close enough to participate but just far enough to be shown her limits. Conway’s tone stayed pleasant, even warm at times, but anyone listening closely could hear the undercurrent meant for her alone. Each gentle nod signaled that her authority was narrowing, that the decisions would no longer pass through her hands in the way they once had. BJ’s additions reinforced the message, steadying Conway’s position and softening the blow only enough to make it deniable. Lydia, who once would have steadied Dhru, was elsewhere. Fay, who might have thrown the rhythm off entirely, was absent. The people who could have protected her were gone, and the people who knew how to shift power were fully in the room. The machine was not only running smoothly, it was quietly teaching Dhru where she now stood.

A Human Crack in the Room

What lingered with me long after the meeting ended was not a policy or a sentence or even a decision. It was the laughter. Not Conway’s, which surfaced throughout the evening with that polished ease he carries so naturally. His laugh never took the room with it. People smiled politely but did not follow. It was a laugh used to smooth edges, to signal confidence, to remind everyone that he was comfortable in a room he already owned. Pleasant on the surface, but hollow to the ear.

The laugh that mattered came later, and it did not begin with Conway at all. It belonged to Marc.

He said something small, almost nothing. I had to rewind the video again and again just to catch the words, which were barely a joke, more of an unintentional aside. It was not funny. Meghan did not laugh. She barely looked up from her screen, content to move through the evening without needing to soften anything around her.

But the room laughed anyway.

Marc’s dad joke was so bad it could qualify as public service. It single-handedly brought humanity back into the room. It was the first uncalculated sound in a meeting that had been rehearsed in tone if not in script. A genuine moment, accidental and awkward, from someone who had arrived without armor or advantage, responding in real time to a structure he did not yet understand. Marc had no strategy. He had no choreography. He simply reacted as a person would, and the room clung to it like a match struck in a dim hallway.

Conway laughed too, this time more naturally than before, and for a heartbeat the distance between the calculated and the unguarded blurred. But unlike Marc, his laugh carried the faint sweetness of embarrassment, the quiet recognition that someone else had given the room what he could not. A moment of ease that did not originate from control.

And then, as quickly as it opened, the moment closed. Meghan returned to her reading. Marc straightened. Conway slipped back into his role with practiced precision. But for one brief interval, the machinery paused, and everyone reached instinctively toward the only real thing that had appeared all night.

The laugh that swept the room didn’t come from the joke. It was relief. Pure relief. Even my pressure cooker has less pent-up tension. A human crack in an engineered room.

What the Smoke Left Me With

When the meeting ended, I stepped outside for a breath of night air. The smoke from the fire had thinned, but it still lingered in the hallway, the same way traces of the evening clung to my thoughts. My neighbor’s door was quiet now, her name already gone, the building fast at work absorbing what it could not bear to hold. Loss has its own speed here.

The building erased my neighbor’s name faster than RIOC erased accountability. At least the building had the decency to smell like smoke.

I found myself thinking of that empty chair at the table and of Dhru’s shrinking space beside Conway. Power had rearranged itself in plain sight, tidy and practiced, while the people who might have steadied the room were elsewhere. The institution had not reformed. It had simply learned to breathe without the ones who once tried to strengthen its lungs.

As I walked back inside, the faint smell of burnt drywall followed me. It was a reminder that not everything erased is gone, and not everything approved is progress. Some traces stay in the air long after the flames are out. Some truths linger quietly in the corners, waiting for someone to notice them. Some rooms forget too quickly. Some rooms remember only when the smoke insists.