My Business Partner Forged My Signature to Sell Our Company. He Forgot I Kept the Original Napkin.

Part 4: The Napkin

I did not open the bag in front of Marcy.

I hugged her, which surprised both of us, and I told her again to come to work tomorrow, and I stood in the doorway and watched her walk to her car. She waved from the driver’s seat. I waved back.

Then I closed the door and I sat down at my kitchen table and I unwrapped the frame.

The glass was cracked. A single line running from the top left corner down to the middle. Otherwise it was intact. The napkin behind the glass had yellowed a little in eight years, and one corner had a small brown ring where a coffee cup had touched it that morning in the diner. The blue ballpoint had faded.

Both signatures were still there.

*Trust is everything.*

I read that line a long time.

I thought about Derek at twenty-nine, sitting across from me in that booth, his tie loosened, telling me his ideas for how we could scale, his hands moving the way they moved when he was excited. I had liked him. I had believed him. I had believed him for eight years.

I thought about the version of him who had walked into my house while I was somewhere else, and taken this frame off my wall, and carried it out to his car. Had he felt anything, doing that? Had he stood in my hallway and looked at the photo of my daughter’s graduation, six inches from his hand, and thought about the day she was born and how I had brought her to the office three weeks later because I could not afford a nanny yet, and he had held her while I ran payroll?

I did not know. I was never going to know.

That was the thing nobody warns you about with betrayal. You do not just lose the person. You lose the answer to every question you will ever have about them.

I put the frame on the kitchen table and I made myself a cup of tea and I sat with it for a while.

The doorbell rang again around ten. This time it was Tom. He had driven in from Raleigh. He had a bottle of wine, which was funny because Tom does not really drink.

“I thought you might not want to be alone tonight.”

“I’m okay.”

“I know. I came anyway.”

He saw the frame on the table. He did not ask. He sat down across from me and he poured two glasses of wine and we sat there.

After a while he said, “You did everything right, Elaine.”

“I know.”

“So why do you look like that.”

I thought about how to answer.

“Because I keep thinking. If he had just asked. If he had come to me a year ago and said, Elaine, I want out, I want to sell, I need the money, I’m tired. I would have said yes. I might have said yes. We could have sold it together. We could have done it right.”

Tom turned his wine glass in his hand.

“He couldn’t ask. Men like Derek can’t ask. Asking means admitting you don’t already have it.”

“That’s a sad way to live.”

“It is.”

We did not say anything else about Derek that night.

In the morning I went to work. I called an all-hands meeting at ten. Twenty-three employees, standing around the coffee station on the second floor. Some of them had been with me for six years. Some of them had been hired in the last six months, by Derek, without my input.

I told them the truth. All of it. The forgery, the sale, the arrest, the unwinding. I told them their jobs were safe. I told them the company was mine again, and would stay mine, and that I was not going anywhere.

Then I told them I was raising everyone’s salary by four percent, effective immediately. Because they had come to work every day for the last five months while their bosses were at war, and they had done their jobs, and I had noticed.

Marcy started to cry. Then a few other people started to cry. Then somebody, I think it was Kevin from accounting, started clapping, and then everyone was clapping, and I stood there in front of them and I did not cry, but it was close.

After the meeting a woman named Priya, who had been our operations manager for four years and who had, I now realized, effectively been running the company for the last six months while Derek was busy destroying it, came into my office and closed the door.

“Elaine. I need to tell you something. I’ve been offered a job at a competitor. I turned it down last week because I wanted to see what was going to happen here. I’m glad I did. But I need to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“If Derek was your partner. Are you looking for another one.”

I looked at her. I had known Priya for four years. I had eaten lunch with her twice a week. I had met her husband and her two children. I had never once considered making her a partner because Derek was my partner, and there was only room for one.

There is only room for one until there isn’t.

“Priya. Let me think about it. Give me a week.”

She nodded. She stood up. At the door she turned around.

“For what it’s worth. I always wondered how you two worked together. You didn’t seem like the same kind of person.”

She left.

I sat in my office for a while after that.

That night I went home and I took the framed napkin off the kitchen table and I carried it back to the hallway. I hung it where it had always hung, ten feet from the kitchen, next to my daughter’s high school graduation photo. The crack in the glass was still there. I did not replace the glass. I decided I liked the crack. It looked like the frame had survived something, which it had.

I stood in the hallway and I looked at the napkin and I read the words one more time.

*Trust is everything.*

I had believed that at thirty-four, in a diner off Highway 40, with a napkin and a ballpoint pen and a man who was going to spend the next eight years earning my trust and then two hours selling it for four point two million dollars.

I still believed it. That was the strange part. I had lost the company and gotten it back. I had lost a partner and would maybe, in a week, find a better one. I had lost Derek, and I would not get him back, and I did not want him back.

But I had not lost the belief.

I turned off the hallway light and I walked to the kitchen and I fed the cat. Through the window over the sink I could see the neighbor’s porch light on across the street, and the shape of somebody moving behind their curtain, living whatever life they were living, and I thought, we are all just doing this. We are all just trusting people and getting it wrong and getting it right and trying again.

I ran the water for the dishes. The cat wound around my ankles.

The phone in my back pocket buzzed. A text from Priya.

*Take your week. I’ll be here.*

I set the phone face down on the counter and I washed the dishes, and I did not think about Derek at all.