“You can’t do that.” His voice had lost its collaborative register. The businessman’s composure was cracking along a seam he had not known was there. “My company is going public next month. The IPO is—the timing is critical. If you pull support now—”
“I’m aware of your timeline,” Alexander said. He was still standing with one hand resting on his daughter’s shoulder, and his voice had not changed its quality or volume. He might have been discussing a change in weather plans. “I’m also aware that the majority of your institutional investor relationships trace back to introductions made through my network, and that your lead underwriter’s existing relationship with Reed Financial has been a primary factor in the confidence your offering has generated in the market.”
The room was very quiet.
“You’d destroy my company,” Ethan said, and the word destroy was stripped bare, the performance entirely gone, just a man looking at the edge of something he had spent years building. “You’d destroy everything I’ve built over—over this?”
Alexander met his eyes steadily. There was no cruelty in his expression. There was no satisfaction either. Just the calm of a man who has thought clearly about something and arrived at a position he is prepared to hold.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. I’m not doing anything to your company, Ethan. I’m simply withdrawing support I extended in good faith. What you’ve built, you built. And what you’ve done—to someone who helped you build it, during the years when building it was hard and uncertain and no one else believed in you—that, you also did. I’m not destroying anything. I’m removing something you never earned.”
He picked up the signed divorce papers from the table and held them for a moment, as though weighing them.
“The consequences of your choices belong to you. Not to me.”
He set the papers back down.
The silence in the room had a texture now. Ethan stood very still. Vanessa had moved several inches closer to the wall, as though the wall might offer structural support against what was happening. The lawyer had found something important to examine in the middle distance, slightly to the left of everything.
“Ethan.” Vanessa’s voice had thinned to something barely above a whisper. “What does that mean? What does that mean for the IPO?”