Chapter 7: The Ultimatum

Robert stood up. Evan would remember that particular detail for the rest of his life — the exact moment his father rose off the arm of the loveseat, as though the conversation had reached a point that required him to be physically taller than it, taller than his own youngest son sitting there with his arms still crossed over a borrowed T-shirt.

“I have spent thirty years building this company, Evan. Thirty years. I watched my own father build it before that, from a single warehouse and four employees, into something that puts food on two hundred tables. I am not going to sit here and watch you tear that down out of spite because you’re hurt — and God knows you have every right to be hurt, I am not disputing that for one second — but if you intend to go around this town making a spectacle out of your brother to punish him, then maybe you shouldn’t be working for this company right now.”

The room seemed to hold its breath.

“Are you firing me?”

“Evan —”

“Are you firing me, Dad? Ask yourself the question and then answer it. Say the actual words.”

Robert should have stopped there. Every part of him, later — lying awake at one in the morning, sitting alone in his truck in the Mercer Industrial parking lot at ten the next day, staring at an envelope with his son’s handwriting on the front — would wish with everything in his chest that he’d stopped exactly there, at the edge of the question, and simply said no, of course not, that’s not what I meant, let’s sit back down. Instead something in him — thirty years of protecting a company that had never once, in his whole adult life, asked him to protect it from his own son — pushed the words out before he could catch them.