Chapter 12 - For Cause
He pointed at me, his hand shaking.
“You can’t fire me.
My contract guarantees five years of compensation.”
For the first time all evening, I smiled.
“Only if you’re dismissed without cause.”
There was a particular justice in that sentence that only Lucan and I fully appreciated in the moment, because Lucan had written that clause himself.
Years earlier, negotiating his own contract, he had insisted on the five-year compensation guarantee as protection against exactly the kind of corporate takeover that had just occurred — a golden parachute, so that if new owners ever pushed him out, he’d walk away wealthy.
He had been so proud of that clause.
He had mentioned it to me more than once, as evidence of his own cleverness, his foresight, his understanding of how these things worked.
What he had never bothered to notice — because it would have required imagining a scenario where he was the one who’d done something wrong — was the standard exception written into every such clause: without cause. The parachute only opens if you’re pushed out for no reason.
It does not open if you’re terminated for fraud.
Lucan had built himself a shield against being wronged and never once considered that he might be the wrongdoer, and so he had walked into that party genuinely believing that whatever happened, his contract protected him.
He was still believing it as he pointed his shaking hand at me.
And I got to watch, in real time, the exact moment he remembered the two words that turned his own shield into the instrument of his ruin.
His clever clause did not protect him from consequences.
It only guaranteed that his consequences would be thorough.
The general counsel opened the folder and listed the findings without any drama at all, which made them land harder: falsified expense reports, undisclosed conflicts of interest, vendor kickbacks, deleted audit emails, misuse of company funds.
And because Bellweather supplied components under federal contracts, she added, the board had already referred the evidence to the appropriate authorities.
Lavinia grabbed his sleeve.
“You told me the invoices were protected.”
His head snapped toward her.
May you like
“Be quiet.”
That one exchange went through the ballroom like a current through water.
