Chapter 10 - The Boardroom Ultimatum
The board gave me a choice.
Step aside temporarily.
Or risk a shareholder revolt.
A week earlier, that would have terrified me.
Now I looked through the conference-room window and thought about Oliver asking whether I would still be there tomorrow.
“I'll step aside.”
Martin stared at me.
“You built this company.”
“No. Thousands of employees built it.”
For the first time, I understood the difference.
I appointed Martin interim CEO.
Then I spent my first free weekday in twenty years taking my sons to a park.
Oliver wanted to race.
Elliot wanted to feed ducks.
Neither cared what Hawthorne Resorts' stock price was.
Rosalind watched from a bench.
“You look different,” she said.
“Unemployed?”
She laughed.
“Present.”
That word stayed with me.
Later, Rebecca called.
Nathan's records had allowed investigators to separate legitimate company assets from Harrison's shell transactions.
The company would survive.
Harrison, however, had been located.
He was preparing to leave the country.
Authorities stopped him before departure.
At an airport.
The irony wasn't lost on anyone.
He eventually agreed to cooperate.
And what he revealed was worse than expected.
Genevieve had initiated the plan to separate Rosalind and me.
But Harrison had escalated it.
He created the fake payment.
He fabricated additional records.
He intercepted later attempts Rosalind made to reach me.
And he used my mother's fear of scandal as leverage for years.
Then Harrison made one final allegation.
He claimed my father had known about the twins before his stroke.
I refused to believe it.
Until Rebecca showed me a date.
One of my father's recordings had been created twelve days before his stroke.
If Harrison was telling the truth, my father had known.
The question was whether he had remained silent—
May you like
or whether he had tried to reach me and someone stopped him too.
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