Some employees thought my Slack message was inappropriate; others found it clarifying. Sabine resigned three weeks after the announcement, though I neither requested nor engineered her departure. Rowan had spent five nights assuming I would do what I’d always done—wait for him to return, call him repeatedly, cry, listen to whatever explanation he offered, and eventually accept it. But the message wasn’t revenge. It was simply proof that I’d finally stopped waiting. The suitcases in the lobby, Gideon’s office, and the settlement were the consequences of that decision.

That spring, I repainted the Marblehead property the same color my grandfather’s house had been when I was a child. Now I sit on the porch some mornings drinking coffee without sugar, and Rowan rarely enters my thoughts. Instead, I think about my grandfather and the logistics company he quietly built over fifty years. He left me forty-one percent without explaining why, almost as though he’d known there might come a day when I would need the independence it provided. Maybe he trusted that, when that day arrived, I’d understand exactly what to do. He was right. He usually was.