Marcus stood by the window, looking out at the city, refusing to make eye contact with Elena.

The quarterly meeting was tomorrow. She took the aggregated sales data for her "Mountaineers" segment—the VIPs. This was the revenue stream that kept the lights on.

She tweaked the parameters. The PDF warned against default settings: "Always check for seasonality."

She saved the Excel file as Apex_Q4_Strategy_FINAL.xlsx .

He turned to Marcus. "Why aren't we doing this for the European markets?"

She created three calculated columns.

The search results were a mess of broken links, paid courses, and sketchy file repositories. She clicked through pages of irrelevant tutorials until she landed on a forgotten academic repository. There, buried under a generic filename— Advanced_Excel_Models_Guide.pdf —was a document from a retired data scientist.