My Business Partner Locked Me Out of the Company I Built. He Forgot I Still Owned the Building.

Part 3: The Notice

I did not send the letter for six days.

I wanted Doug to feel comfortable first. Comfortable men make sloppy decisions. I knew this because I had spent six years watching Doug make his best decisions when he was scared and his worst decisions when he thought he’d already won.

For six days I did nothing publicly. I did not respond to the suspension letter. I did not appear at the office. I did not talk to any of the employees who reached out, though I saved every message in a folder called *After*.

I did one thing. I met with Jean twice more, and I met with a commercial real estate broker named Denise, and I met with the president of First Cedar Bank, who had known my mother, and by Thursday afternoon I had a bridge loan approved, a wire scheduled, and a plan for what the building would be used for starting in April.

On Friday morning I put on a navy blazer and drove to the office.

Not the office. My building.

I parked in the visitor lot. I did not go inside. I sat in my car and I watched the front doors for a while.

At 9:14, Doug arrived. He was wearing the blue Patagonia vest he wore when he wanted to look like a founder instead of a finance guy. He was on the phone. He was laughing.

At 9:16, a courier arrived at the front doors and handed Terrence an envelope addressed to Douglas Reiner, CEO, Halberg-Reiner Analytics LLC.

Inside the envelope was a letter from Petrangeli Properties LLC, informing the tenant that the lease at 1401 Sycamore Boulevard would not be renewed upon its expiration in forty-three days, and that all corporate personal property would need to be removed from the premises by 5:00 PM on that date, per Section 17 of the executed lease agreement.

The letter was signed by the new owner of Petrangeli Properties LLC.

Which, as of the sale closing three days earlier, was me.

I sat in my car and watched Terrence take the envelope inside. I watched him hand it to the receptionist. I watched her look at it, and then look up, and then look toward the elevator.

I drove home.

Doug called me at 10:41. I let it go to voicemail. He called again at 10:44. Then at 10:52. Then at 11:15, from a different number.

I answered on the fourth try.

“Ellen. What the hell is this.”

“Hi Doug.”

“What. Is. This.”

“I assume you’re referring to the non-renewal notice.”

A long pause. I could hear him breathing. Doug breathes through his nose when he’s furious. It’s one of his tells.

“You bought the building.”

“I did.”

“When.”

“Tuesday.”

Another pause. Longer.

“Ellen. Whatever this is. Whatever you think you’re doing. We can talk about this. The suspension, the review, none of that has to be permanent. Kevin and I, we can, “

“Doug.”

“What.”

“I don’t want to talk about the suspension. I don’t want to talk about the review. I don’t want to talk about Kevin. I want you to understand something, and then I want to hang up.”

Silence.

“You have forty-three days to find a new office for forty-two people and a server room. Cedar Falls has about eleven thousand square feet of Class A commercial space currently available, none of it contiguous, most of it in the old First National building on Fourth Street which flooded in 2022 and still has mold issues. The nearest suitable space is in Waterloo, which is a twenty-four minute drive from most of your employees’ homes. Ten of them will quit rather than make that commute. I know because I know them.”

“Ellen.”

“I’m not finished. Your investors close their next tranche in June, contingent on operational milestones that require the platform to be up. Moving a server room takes eight to twelve weeks if you have a plan, which you don’t. If the platform goes down for more than seventy-two hours, you’ll trigger the SLA clauses on your three biggest contracts. Wexler will walk. Probably Griffin too. When they walk, your ARR drops below the threshold in the investor term sheet, and the tranche doesn’t close.”

“You’d burn the whole company down.”

“No, Doug. You did that on Monday. I’m just the landlord.”

I hung up.

I sat on my couch. My hands were shaking. Not from fear. From something else. Something I didn’t have a name for yet.

An hour later, Meg called.

“Rachel just texted me. Doug’s people are calling every reporter in town trying to get ahead of a story. What story, Ellen.”

“Tell Rachel to check the Black Hawk County property records. The sale recorded this morning.”

“Ellen. Oh my god.”

“Tell her the new owner is available for comment tomorrow.”

“Ellen. Are you okay.”

I thought about that.

“I don’t know yet.”

“What did he actually do. On Monday. Tell me.”

I hadn’t told anyone yet. I hadn’t even said it out loud in my own house.

“He forged a wire authorization. Six months ago. Moved 340 thousand from an operating account to a vendor that turned out to be a shell company his brother-in-law’s dental practice does business with. Then he backdated a memo saying I’d approved it. Then he had Kevin call an emergency board meeting to review ‘financial irregularities’ with my signature on them.”

“Ellen.”

“He was going to force me out at a discount valuation. Buy my shares back through the company at the ‘distressed’ price. Get me signing an NDA to make it go away. Take the whole thing to Series C without me on the cap table.”

“How do you know.”

“Because he told his assistant to move a lunch meeting on Tuesday to accommodate a call with a lawyer named Brennan Voss. Brennan Voss specializes in founder buyouts under duress. His assistant is Marta’s cousin.”

A long silence on Meg’s end.

“Ellen. You have proof of the forgery?”

“I have the original wire request in my email, sent from Doug’s laptop at 11:14 PM on a Saturday I was in Chicago at a conference. His IP logged in at his home address. My signature on the memo is a copy paste from a document I signed in 2021. The pixels are wrong when you zoom in. My lawyer has all of it.”

“Then why are you doing the building thing. Why not just, “

“Because a lawsuit takes eighteen months, Meg. And in eighteen months, Doug will have moved on, he’ll be somewhere else running someone else’s company, and every employee I hired will have watched me lose. This ends in forty-three days. Not eighteen months.”

Another pause.

“You’re scaring me a little.”

“I’m scaring me too.”

That night I did something I hadn’t planned to do.

I drove to Marta’s apartment. She lived in a duplex on the east side, near the river. I hadn’t been there since her housewarming three years ago.

She opened the door in sweatpants, saw my face, and stepped aside without saying anything.

“I need help,” I said. “And I need to know if you’re willing to lose your job for something that might work.”

She poured us both a glass of wine.

“Ellen,” she said. “I’ve been waiting six years for you to ask me that.”