“Uh, maybe never, now that I think of it.”
“Damn, does your butler open them for you?”
“No, but doors do tend to open for me wherever I go.”
“Must be nice.”
“It is. There are a lot of strings attached though. I won’t stand here on your parents’ old farm and ask you to pity the poor little rich boy, but I can promise you my life has been far from perfect.”
I nodded. “I understand. It’s not a competition. Everyone goes through it at some point in their lives.”
He hopped over the gate after me, making it look effortless. Then he took my hand and we walked up the road leading to the main complex.
Whitaker Farms had been broken up into two sections. Both had chickens, but one area was for the eggs and the other areawas for selling the animals themselves. Each group had different types of chickens, so they were kept in separate chicken houses. I looked up at the egg house. From the outside, it pretty much looked like a long warehouse.
Now that everything had been shut down, it seemed so silent. Back when my parents had been running this place full tilt, the noise had been overwhelming. Now it was just the empty husk of what it once was.
“Did you ever see this place when it was operating?” I asked him.
“No, unfortunately.”
“It was something to see.” I walked into the chicken house, noting that all the hardware was still in place. The fences and pens and gates. It was just the life that was missing. “I’m shocked it’s all still in good condition.”
“I’m shocked this has just been sitting here empty the last few years,” he said, looking around with a sharp eye. “There has to be something we can do with this place.”
I glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. “We?”
“Well, the company, I mean.” He gestured around the space. “It seems like such a waste not to use this for something. I don’t know what my father was thinking, closing it down.”
“Everyone in Ferris asked the same question.” I kept walking down the long aisle and he kept pace with me. “People expected some changes when Allory bought the place, but no one had anticipated it closing down completely.”
We reached the end of the chicken house and Carter pulled the sliding door open. It squealed on its tracks after years of disuse. The other massive chicken house was across the way, between the two buildings was the office building.
I nodded toward it. “Do you think they left stuff in there too?”
Carter shrugged. “Probably. Sometimes it’s cheaper to abandon things than to ship them and pay for storage.”
“Is everything disposable to Allory?”
“To the company, yeah, back when Dad was in charge,” he said. “Not to me. I haven’t spent a lot of time in my life thinking about my legacy, but I’ve come to realize recently that I don’t want to leave a trail of destruction in my wake like my father did.”
“See that?” I pointed to the farmhouse up on the hill. “That’s where I grew up.”
“It looks like a nice place, although I thought it would be closer.”
“Far enough away from the chicken houses that we weren’t driven crazy by the sound or the smells.”
I saw the gears turning in his head, imagining what it had been like. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“I haven’t been able to bring myself to go inside since my parents sold.” I sighed and shook my head sadly. “My parents thought Allory would take over production. I don’t think they understood how the sale would turn out.”
“I think in this case, buying the farm wasn’t Allory looking to make Ferris prosper.” Carter sounded guilty. “Sometimes they bought farms specifically to shut them down, to cut down competitors. It’s something we learned in the tech world. You don’t buy companies to innovate. You buy them to kill them.”
“You’ve done deals like that before?” I asked.
He looked at his feet and nodded. “I’m ashamed to say it now, but yes. I don’t think any of those deals were as devastating as what happened here, but I still feel bad. Seeing things from the other side has made me rethink a lot of past business decisions.”
“That sounds like growth,” I told him, leaning my head against his arm. “We can’t change who we’ve been but we can try to be better in the future.”
