Chapter 5 - Fifty-Eight Percent
The lights dimmed, and the stage washed over with a deep blue.
Thurston stepped to the microphone and thanked the employees who had held Bellweather together through eighteen months of debt, canceled orders, and one disastrous expansion.
Lucan let go of my wrist and straightened his jacket, arranging his face into the expression of a man about to be rewarded.
“Tonight,” Thurston said, “we welcome the investor whose capital saved eight hundred jobs and retired the most dangerous debt this company has ever carried.
The acquisition closed today.
Solstice Holdings now owns fifty-eight percent of Bellweather Systems.”
Lucan was the first to applaud.
I have replayed that detail more than any other from the whole night: my husband, the loudest and most enthusiastic clapper in the room, applauding Solstice Holdings without the faintest idea that he was applauding me.
He thought he was applauding his own good fortune — a well-capitalized investor arriving to save the company he expected to be named president of, an investor whose money would fund the bright future he’d been describing for three weeks.
He clapped hard.
He clapped like a man welcoming his own coronation.
And I stood beside him watching him celebrate the exact instrument of his destruction, and I felt the strangest calm settle over me, the calm that comes at the very top of a thing you have built with great care and are now about to watch work.
There was no hurry left in me, no anxiety.
Everything was already done.
The papers were signed, the board had voted, the audit was complete, the folder was on the lectern.
All that remained was for the truth to be spoken aloud, and my husband was, at that very moment, applauding the arrival of it.
I did not applaud.
I stood still, and I watched him clap, and I waited for Thurston to say my name.
And then Thurston looked directly at me.
May you like
“Please welcome Solstice’s founder and Bellweather’s new majority owner — Ms.
Celestine Ingram.”
