“Your vote.”
“Against or for?”
“That is your decision.”
I appreciated the answer.
She continued.
“But I recommend you review the revised employment guarantees.”
A courier delivered the documents an hour later.
The new proposal was better.
Much better.
Five-year manufacturing commitments.
Store-closure restrictions.
Retention bonuses.
Pension protections.
Employee equity conversion.
Martin, for all his corruption, had been right about one thing:
The transaction could genuinely benefit Belle & Vale’s workforce.
That made my decision harder.
If the deal had been purely evil, courage would have been simple.
Real life rarely offers that luxury.
Sometimes bad people support good outcomes for bad reasons.
Sometimes exposing wrongdoing risks destroying something worth preserving.
Daniel watched me read.
“What are you thinking?”
“That Martin used the employees as moral cover.”
“Yes.”
“But the employee protections are real.”
“Yes.”
“So rejecting the sale to punish him could hurt people who had nothing to do with this.”
“Yes.”
“I hate when you agree with me.”
“It saves time.”
I looked at the signature page.
“My vote puts them over ninety?”
“Likely.”
“And if I withhold?”
“The transaction probably dies.”
I thought about Mara.
My associates.
Warehouse employees.
Tailors.
Drivers.
People who would never meet Martin Vale but whose mortgages depended on decisions made in his conference room.
Then I noticed an appendix.
Executive retention compensation.
Martin Vale:
$68 million.
I laughed.
Daniel leaned over.
“Oh.”
“Sixty-eight million dollars.”
“Apparently sacrifice begins below the C-suite.”
I kept reading.
There was a clause allowing payment despite pending internal misconduct findings unless Martin was formally terminated for cause before closing.
I closed the document.
“There.”
Daniel looked at me.
“What?”
“That’s the whole game.”
Martin didn’t merely need the deal approved.
He needed it approved before the investigation ended.
If it closed first, he could collect tens of millions even if the board removed him afterward.
The urgency.
The share consolidation.
Richard.
Northstar.
Blake.
Me.
Everything narrowed toward one deadline.
Martin had spent years constructing a path to the transaction.
And I now controlled the final gate.
I called Eleanor.
“I’ll support the sale.”
She paused.
“With no conditions?”
“No.”
“I suspected there was another sentence.”
“There is.”
I looked at Martin’s retention clause.
“Terminate Martin for cause before the vote.”
Silence.
Then Eleanor said:
“We may not yet have sufficient findings.”
“You have Richard’s records.”
“Evidence of related-party transactions, yes.”
“Sofia’s notes.”
“Yes.”
“Gerald’s authorization tokens.”
“Yes.”
“Northstar.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need a criminal conviction. You need board-level cause under his employment agreement.”
Eleanor went quiet.
