My Business Partner Wired Himself $340,000 the Night Before Our Buyout, He Didn’t Know I’d Been Reading His Emails for Six Months

Part 4: The Chair He Kept

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

Diane called me the Sunday after closing and asked me to come over for lunch. I went. I brought flowers, because I didn’t know what else to bring to the mother of the man I’d just professionally destroyed.

She’d made chicken salad. She poured us both iced tea. We sat at her small kitchen table and she asked me how my daughter was, and how business was, and whether I’d taken any time off yet.

I said no. I said I probably should.

She said, “Marcus called me yesterday.”

I put down my fork.

“He said he wanted to explain. I told him no.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

She looked at me and her eyes were tired in a way I hadn’t seen before.

“Sarah, I want you to understand something. I don’t hate my son. I don’t. But I raised him with his father, and his father was a man who thought rules were for other people, and I watched Marcus become that man for thirty years, and every time I said something about it I got told I was overreacting. So I stopped saying things. And then you called me at ten o’clock at night and asked me to sign a piece of paper, and I realized I had been waiting to be asked for a very long time.”

I couldn’t answer. I just nodded.

She said, “I’d like us to still know each other. If that’s alright.”

I said it was. I said it was more than alright.

We didn’t talk about Marcus again that afternoon.

I did not have a triumphant post-closing chapter. I would like to tell you I bought a boat and went on a cruise and toasted my own cleverness. I did not. What I did was this: I paid off my house. I put four hundred thousand into a college fund for my daughter. I gave every employee at Halden & Rowe a retention bonus out of my own share, ranging from three thousand for the newest hire to forty thousand for our operations director, who had been with us fifteen years. Meridian was not thrilled about that, but it wasn’t their money yet at the time I wrote the checks.

I took my daughter to Ireland for two weeks in August. She wanted to see the cliffs. We saw the cliffs. She took a picture of me standing at the edge and later told me I looked, in her words, “like someone who had just quit something big.” I hadn’t told her anything about Marcus. She just saw it in my face.

Marcus’s wife left him in September. I did not celebrate. I did not send flowers. I did nothing. I heard about it from Diane.

In October, on what would have been our anniversary week at the company, I got a handwritten letter from Marcus. Four pages. I read the first page and then I stopped, not because it was cruel but because it wasn’t. He was trying to be honest and it was making me feel things I didn’t want to feel yet. I put the letter in a drawer.

I have not opened it again. I might. I don’t know.

Meridian rebranded Halden & Rowe six months after the acquisition. The sign on the Cherry Street building came down in April. I drove by the day they did it. I sat in my car across the street and watched two guys on a lift unbolt the letters one by one.

The H was the last one to come down.

I thought I would cry. I didn’t. I felt something quieter than crying, something that didn’t have a name.

I drove home. My daughter was at the kitchen table, doing calculus now, and she looked up when I came in and said, “Mom, did you know that if you divide by zero the whole universe breaks?”

I said, “I did know that, actually.”

She said, “You look weird. You okay?”

I said I was okay. I sat down across from her.

She went back to her homework. I watched her work for a while. She has her father’s hairline and my hands, and she chews on the end of her pencil the way I did in high school, and she is going to be a person I don’t fully know soon, and I sat there and I thought about all of it. Marcus, the wire, Diane’s lipstick at 6 a.m., the H coming down off the building, the letter in my drawer.

I thought: I did the right thing. I also thought: I did a hard thing. Those are not the same sentence and I don’t think they’re supposed to be.

At the office I kept for consulting work after the sale, there is a chair in the corner. It’s Marcus’s old chair from Cherry Street, the one he sat in for the first eight years of the company, before we could afford new furniture. I don’t know why I kept it. I told the movers to bring it. They asked if I wanted it refurbished. I said no.

Sometimes clients come in and sit in it and I don’t say anything.

Sometimes I sit in my own chair, across the room, and I look at the empty one.

I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

Diane came over for Thanksgiving. She brought a pie. My daughter set the table for four out of habit and then remembered and quietly took away the extra plate before Diane could see.

Diane saw anyway. She didn’t say anything. She just squeezed my daughter’s shoulder as she walked past.

We ate. We laughed once or twice. It was fine. It was actually fine.

After dinner, after Diane went home, my daughter and I did the dishes together, and she said, without looking up from the sink, “Mom, do you miss him?”

I said, “Sometimes.”

She said, “Is that weird?”

I said, “No. It’s just what happens when you know someone a long time.”

She thought about that. She rinsed a plate.

She said, “I don’t miss him.”

I said, “You don’t have to.”

She nodded. She kept washing.

Outside, it started to snow, the first snow of the year, small and half-hearted, the kind that wouldn’t stick.

I dried the plate she handed me and put it away.