My Business Partner Wired Himself $340,000 the Night Before My Wedding, He Forgot I Still Had the Bank App

Part 4: The Quiet

The next six months were not a movie.

I want to say that because the shape of a revenge story wants to end at that lobby, at those doors closing on a black SUV, at the satisfaction of the wall coming down behind his eyes. That is where the applause is supposed to go.

That is not where it ended.

The acquisition closed. Patricia and her team, to their enormous credit, honored the deal on the modified terms Ben negotiated over three brutal weeks in July. The purchase price came down. My share came down with it. I was still, by any reasonable measure, a wealthy man on the other side of it, but I had spent the previous nine years imagining a specific number in a specific account, and the number was smaller now, and the smallness of it sat on my chest in a way I had not expected.

Ryan was charged with seven counts of wire fraud. His lawyer, a good one out of Chicago, moved for bail. It was granted. He came home to Priya’s house wearing an ankle monitor.

Priya called me a week after the arrest.

I let it go to voicemail. I listened to it three times before I called her back.

We met at a Panera in Cascade, of all places, because she said she couldn’t do it at either of our houses. She had lost weight. Her hands shook when she picked up her coffee cup.

She said, “I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I keep going back through the last two years and asking what I missed. The trip to Turks and Caicos. The Range Rover. He told me business was good. He told me you were doing well.”

“Priya.”

“Arjun asked me last night if Uncle Ryan is a bad person.”

I did not know what to say to that. I still don’t.

She looked at me across the table, and she said, “I am not going to ask you to drop the charges. I know you can’t. I know you shouldn’t. I just wanted you to know that I don’t hate you for this. In case you were worrying about that.”

I hadn’t been worrying about that until she said it. Then I couldn’t stop.

We sat there for a while. She asked about Claire. I asked about Arjun. She got up to leave, and then she stopped at the edge of the booth and said, “He kept a Christmas card you sent us in 2018 in his sock drawer. I found it when I was going through his things last week. The one where you wrote that he was the reason the company existed.”

She left before I could answer.

I drove home the long way.

Ryan took a plea deal in October. Fifty-one months, federal, minimum security in Morgantown. He’ll be out before Arjun starts high school. Priya filed for divorce in November. She moved to Ann Arbor to be closer to her sister. She sends me a text on Arjun’s birthday every year, just a photo of him and the cake, no message.

Diane invoiced me $47,000 for her four days of work. It was the best money I have ever spent in my life. She sent me a card at Christmas with a photo of her daughter’s graduation on it. I keep it on the fridge.

Claire and I bought a house in East Grand Rapids in the spring. There is a room upstairs that we haven’t figured out what to do with yet. She keeps calling it the office. I keep calling it the guest room. Neither of us is quite ready to say what we’re actually not saying about it.

I started a new firm in April. Just me and Doug the CFO and two designers I poached from a competitor. We took a smaller office above a bakery on Wealthy Street. On the first day, Doug walked in with a housewarming plant and said, “So who’s the primary signer on the account.”

“I am,” I said.

“And who’s secondary.”

I looked at him.

“Nobody. Not yet.”

He nodded like that was the right answer and set the plant on the windowsill.

I go to the office six days a week. I get home in time for dinner. Claire and I take a walk after, down to the reservoir and back, and sometimes we talk and sometimes we don’t. Last Tuesday she stopped on the bridge and said, “Do you ever miss him.”

I thought about it for a long time.

I said, “I miss who I thought he was. That’s not the same thing.”

She said, “No. It isn’t.”

We kept walking.

The thing nobody tells you about revenge, the thing the movies get wrong, is that it does not feel like winning. It feels like something surgical you had to do to survive, and when it’s done you are alive, and the thing that was killing you is gone, and you go home. That’s all. You go home.

I still have the Chase alerts turned on.

I check them every morning with my coffee, on the back porch, before Claire is up. Nothing suspicious ever comes through, because there is nobody to steal from me anymore.

But I check.

I think I always will.