And now they were doing it again. Thirty-seven families who probably looked just like mine had, parents working extra shifts, kids trying to finish school, people who thought if they just worked hard enough they’d be okay.
I picked up the folder and opened it.
Read through every page carefully this time. The displacement pattern, the corporate restructuring, the relocation assistance that wouldn’t help anyone.
My hands were steady now, the panic replaced by something colder and clearer.
If Devlin Holdings wanted a fight, I’d give them one.
This time I had the law on my side. This time I knew how to fight back, this time I wouldn’t watch from the sidelines while another family fell apart.
I pulled out my laptop and started taking notes, building a case, finding the weaknesses in their legal strategy.
Revenge felt like clarity: sharp, cold, and long overdue.
CHAPTER 3
Archer
I satin the back row of Professor Rashford’s corporate restructuring lecture.
The professor was talking about fiduciary duty and shareholder value maximization, drawing diagrams on the whiteboard that most students were barely paying attention to. A guy in the third row openly scrolled through his phone. Two girls near the window were passing notes back and forth, giggling quietly. The kid next to me had his laptop open to what looked like an online poker game.
I’d audited this class twice before and could probably teach it myself at this point, but I kept coming back anyway.
My notebook sat open in front of me, pen ready, neat handwriting trailing off mid-thought about ethical frameworks. The page looked pathetic, half-finished thoughts about corporate responsibility and stakeholder impact that didn’t actually solve anything.
Professor Rashford was good at what he did. He made dry legal concepts feel relevant, pulled real cases into his lectures, asked questions that made students squirm because there weren’t easy answers. Today he was talking about a case where acompany had technically followed all legal requirements but still managed to screw over hundreds of people in the process.
“Legal doesn’t always mean ethical,” he said, tapping the board. “And that’s where you come in. As lawyers, as business leaders, as people with power—you have to ask yourself if following the letter of the law is enough when the spirit of it is clearly being violated.”
A few students nodded. Most looked like they were waiting for him to get to the part that would be on the exam.
I wrote down what he’d said word for word, then stared at it.
Legal doesn’t always mean ethical.
Yeah. I was intimately familiar with that particular problem.
Jake thought I was losing it, spending my time in lectures like this when I had an entire legal team on retainer. Last week over drinks, he’d leaned back in his chair and given me that look, the one that said he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
“You already know this stuff,” he’d said, gesturing at me with his beer. “You have lawyers. Multiple expensive lawyers. Why are you sitting through undergraduate lectures like you’re twenty again?”
I hadn’t had a good answer, or rather I’d had one I didn’t want to say out loud. That I was looking for something, some framework for understanding the distance between intention and harm. Some way to reconcile that my company’s success was built on decisions I’d made before I understood what they cost other people.
That Devlin Holdings had done exactly what Professor Rashford was describing. Followed the letter of the law while violating every ethical principle.
And I’d been the one signing off on it.
Jake wouldn’t understand that. He’d tell me I was overthinking it, that business was business, that I couldn’t save the world by auditing law school classes and taking notes about corporate responsibility.
He was probably right, which somehow made it worse.
My board certainly thought so. They thought I was distracted, soft, too focused on optics and reform instead of profit margins. There had been quiet suggestions lately that maybe I wasn’t the right person to lead Devlin Holdings into its next phase of growth. That maybe my father’s vision required someone more willing to make the hard choices.
The hard choices. That’s what they called it when you displaced families to build luxury condos.
I was starting to wonder if they were right, if inheriting my father’s company had been a mistake, if trying to reform it from within was naive.
