same night. I did not turn it face down. I left it exactly where it was, and I closed the door behind me.
CHAPTER 10: THE CHAIR AT THE END OF THE TABLE
The investigation took eleven days. Eleven days is not very long in the world of corporate review, but it felt like a year of my life. I came in early every one of those days and answered every question they asked me, and I did not ask them for anything in return. The board’s team looked at the forged approval on Annelise’s transfer recommendation, and they looked at the timestamp on the login, and they looked at who it belonged to. They looked at the draft review memo with my own words in it and the CFO’s name on top.
They looked at the calendar entry about my succession, and the names in the agenda, and the date three weeks in the future. And they looked at three vendor contracts routed through a shell company whose registered agent was listed as a man I had never met but whose name I recognized anyway, because my husband still had a photograph of him on his nightstand from college. On the eleventh day they called me into a room on the seventh floor and told me the review was closed. They told me the approval had been forged. They told me the contracts had been entered outside of procurement rules and that roughly two hundred and thirty thousand dollars had left the company above market value. They told me Rafferty was terminated for cause that morning.
They told me the shell company contracts were being voided and that the company was filing a civil claim to recover the misdirected funds. Then they asked me if I wanted to say anything. I said no, thank you, and I asked what time it was, because I had a quarterly review at two. Annelise resigned her consulting contract the next day. She cooperated fully with the board’s team before she left, and she did not ask for anything for it. Her HR consulting firm issued a short statement and sent her home. About a week after that, I got a letter at my house, handwritten, from Annelise. She apologized for the part she played. She wrote that she was not going to pretend she was innocent just because she had been lied to as well.
She wrote that she had believed Rafferty when he told her the marriage was over and that I had personally agreed to sponsor her transfer. She wrote that she should have asked me herself. I read the letter twice, standing at my kitchen counter. I did not write back. I did not throw it away either. I put it in a drawer with the receipt from the notary and the copies of the vendor contracts, because I keep things. The divorce papers were filed in March. I paid for my own lawyer with my own money, and I did not ask him for anything I had not earned. It took longer than I wanted, but it was not complicated, because Rafferty had bigger problems than a division of furniture. One month after the papers were filed,
the company confirmed me as Vice President of Operations. They did not hold a big ceremony. They did hold a small one, in the conference room on the executive floor, at eight in the morning, with coffee and a plate of pastries nobody ate. The first thing I did in the new role was not a speech. It was a process change. I rewrote the approval logs so that no one’s name could be entered on a decision they never made. Every approval now requires a personal login, a timestamp, and a second confirmation tied to the person who owns the decision. If that costs us a little time, I do not care. Time is cheaper than what happened to me. On the day of the confirmation, after everybody had shaken my hand and gone back to their desks, I walked into the room where I had caught him. I stood at the head of the table. The blinds were open. The chair to my right was empty. And it was fine. I want to close this the way I would close it if you were sitting across from me at my kitchen table. What he took was not my career. He had a plan for that chair, and a signature on a page that was never mine, and a woman he used as a lever. But the chair was built by me, one vendor agreement at a time, over eleven years. He took the marriage, and he took my trust, and I am not going to pretend those are small things. I grieved them. But the chair at the end of the table is mine. And I sat down in it.
