I Cleaned Their Offices for Twenty Years. At the Christmas Party, I Fired the CEO.

Part 4: What Came After

The next six months were not clean.

I want to say that here, because if this story ended in the conference room, or in the recliner beside Dale’s bed, it would be tidier. But it didn’t end there. Real things don’t.

Nathaniel Halberd was terminated for cause on December 19th. The board issued a press release on the 20th citing “material breaches of fiduciary duty” and “improper related-party transactions.” The stock dropped nine percent by the following Monday and recovered most of it by February.

Nathaniel was not arrested in January, or February, or March. The SEC investigation moved at the pace the SEC moves at, which is to say, glacially, with polite letters and requests for documents and interviews scheduled six weeks out. Diane told me, on a phone call in February, that these things take eighteen months to two years, minimum. That I should not expect handcuffs. That I should expect a settlement, eventually, and a bar from serving as a corporate officer, and possibly, if the DA’s office in the county where Carla Redmond’s husband worked decided to press it, some jail time. But not soon.

I was fine with not soon. I had waited nine months. I could wait longer.

The direct-hire of the cleaning staff happened in January. Twenty-two people, some of whom I had worked alongside for over a decade, went from BrightPath contractors to full Halberd employees with benefits, paid time off, and a starting wage of $22.50 an hour. Diane made the announcement in person, in the atrium, in front of the same Christmas tree, which had not yet been taken down.

Kevin from BrightPath tried to call me twice. I did not pick up.

My back pay came through in two installments. I will not tell you the number, because it is not the point, but it was enough. It was enough to pay off the hospital, and to pay off the house, and to hire a full-time aide for Dale so that I could stop being a nurse for a few hours a day and go back to being a wife.

Kimberly kept her job. She was demoted, and required to complete a compliance program, and she cooperated with the investigation. Her husband found out about the parking garage a different way, from her, over a kitchen table, not from a video. I don’t know if they made it. Diane told me in April that they were in counseling. That was the last I heard.

Here is the part I did not expect.

In March, one year exactly from Dale’s stroke, I was pulling into our driveway with groceries when a car I did not recognize pulled up behind me. A woman got out. She was in her fifties. She was crying before she reached the porch.

She was Nathaniel Halberd’s wife.

Her name was Susannah. I had never met her. I had, occasionally, seen her photograph on his desk, in a silver frame, next to a photo of two grown sons.

She stood on my porch in a coat that cost more than my car, and she said:

“I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t be here. I just needed to see you.”

I made her come inside because it was cold. I made her tea. Dale was napping.

She sat at my kitchen table and she told me that Nathaniel had moved out in January. That her sister Clara had been having an affair with him for six years. That the twenty-two million dollars had not, in fact, been for Clara at all, it had been for a second family, in Miami, that Susannah had not known existed until the SEC investigators had shown her the wire records in a conference room in February.

She had two other children, she told me. Younger than the ones in the silver frame. She had not known.

I listened.

I did not know what to say to this woman, who I had never met, whose husband I had destroyed, and who was, it turned out, more destroyed by him than I could have ever been.

She said, finally: “I wanted to thank you. Isn’t that a stupid thing to say.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It is. My children are wrecked. My marriage is over. My sister isn’t my sister anymore. And I am, I am sitting in your kitchen thanking you.”

I thought about it for a while.

“You didn’t come here to thank me,” I said.

She looked up.

“You came here because you wanted to see the person who did it. And you wanted her to be a monster. Because if she’s a monster, then what happened to you makes sense.”

Susannah started crying again. Not loudly. Just steadily, like something that had been leaking for months and finally had a place to leak.

“I’m not a monster, Mrs. Halberd. I’m a woman whose husband had a stroke. That’s all. I’m sorry about your children. I am truly sorry about your children.”

She stayed for another twenty minutes. She did not, in the end, forgive me, and I did not, in the end, apologize, because I was not sorry for what I had done, only for what it had cost her, which was a different thing.

She left a business card on the table when she stood up. Her own name, an interior design firm in Hyde Park.

I did not throw it away.

I did not call her either.

Dale learned to walk again, with a cane, in May. Not far. To the mailbox and back. But he did it on his own two feet, and on the day he did it, he stood in the driveway and said, very slowly and very clearly, three words:

“Told. You. So.”

I asked him what he’d told me so about.

He couldn’t quite get the answer out. It took him a long time. What he finally said was:

“Kentucky.”

The lake house.

We are going to look at one in October. My daughter is driving us down. Dale can sit in the passenger seat now for about two hours at a stretch before he needs to stop, and it is four hours to the lake, so we will stop, and that is fine. We will get there when we get there.

I do not know if Nathaniel Halberd will go to prison. I do not know if Susannah’s children will be all right. I do not know if Kimberly and her husband are still in counseling, or if Diane Prescott, who I still speak to on the phone once a month, will keep her seat on the board when the shareholder vote comes in July.

I do not know a lot of things.

I know that I mopped a floor for nineteen years, and I know that my name is Ruth, and I know that on December 18th, in a black dress, I said it out loud to a man who had never asked, and he heard me.

That is what I know.

The porch light is still on every night when I get home, even though now I come home at a reasonable hour, and even though Dale, on his good days, can almost reach the switch himself.

I have asked him to leave it on anyway.

He does.