The heir they threw away

CHAPTER EIGHT

Arden Walsh was the kind of man who had decided at some point in his career that directness was a personality that would get him to the top of the food chain. By the time Ethan sat across from him in the thirty-first floor conference room at eleven that morning, Walsh believed he was being frank when he was actually being exactly as calculated as everyone else in the building, but was just louder about it.

"I'll be straight with you," Walsh said, settling into his chair with the comfortably, feeling like he had the upper hand here. "I voted against the succession confirmation last night. I want you to know that."

"I know," Ethan said flatly. "You were the second one, no?"

Walsh blinked for a moment, then cleared his throat and adjusted his tie.

"Your grandmother was a brilliant woman who ran this company for fifty years, but she was also a woman who had spent so long building something that she became afraid to let it move fast, and the green energy pipeline is the single most valuable asset this company owns right now. It has been sitting at sixty percent capacity for eighteen months because Eleanor refused to accelerate the rollout timeline and nobody on this board had the nerve to push back on her hard enough." He leaned forward. "I need to know if you're going to be the same."

Ethan looked at right in the eyes without wavering. "The pipeline is at sixty percent capacity because my grandmother spent those eighteen months restructuring the supplier contracts to remove three vendors whose environmental compliance records didn't meet the standards the pipeline is built to represent. She went further to replace them with compliant suppliers took longer than projected because good suppliers who actually meet those standards are not abundant."

He paused for a moment, letting those words sink in. "She wasn't afraid to move fast. She was just unwilling to move fast badly. I intend to continue that distinction, and the rollout will reach eighty percent capacity within six months because two of the three replacement supplier relationships are already finalized and the third closes next week."

Walsh went quiet for a long time.

"I'll have Douglas send you the supplier documentation this afternoon," Ethan said. "If you have concerns after you've read it, my door is wide open." He stood, because he had decided that the meeting was over and Walsh needed to understand that from the beginning. "I'm glad you voted your honest position last night though. I want board members who vote their honest positions because I don't want agreement, I want accuracy."

He was almost to the door when Walsh said, "The Marsh Capital partnership proposal. Are you formally rejecting it?"

Ethan stopped for a moment, frowned, then turned around. "Marsh Capital has a regulatory inquiry pending related to its conduct in the succession process. Until that resolves, any partnership discussion with them would create a liability for the Harmon Group that I'm not willing to carry." He held Walsh's gaze. "Is that a direct enough answer?"

Walsh looked at him for a moment and then, almost involuntarily, nodded with the small, genuine respect of a man who has spent years watching people fail to match his directness and has just encountered someone who doesn't try to match it but simply operates at their own pace, which is higher.

"I'll read the supplier documentation," Walsh said quietly.

"I thought you would," Ethan replied flatly, and left.

Patricia Ng was different. Where Walsh was blunt by design, Ng was careful by nature, she was a woman who had built a thirty-year board career on the understanding that the people who spoke least in a room usually understood it best.

She also had the particular quality of attention that Ethan recognized from his grandmother, the kind that made you aware that every word you said was being filed accurately and would be retrieved with full context.

She did not ask him to justify himself. She poured tea and set a cup in front of him and said, "Tell me what you understand about the Foundation's grant committee and why your grandmother kept me off it."

He sooke to her honestly. Eleanor Cole had believed that Patricia Ng's commercial instincts, which were excellent, were precisely wrong for a grant committee whose mandate was funding projects that would not generate commercial return. And that putting those instincts in that room would gradually shift the committee's decisions toward fundable impact rather than necessary impact, which were often not the same thing.

Patricia listened to this without expression.

"She was right," she said finally with a dry scoff. "I would have done that. I would have done it believing I was being rigorous." She looked at him. "What would you do differently?"

"I'd put you on the committee with a structural constraint. A charter amendment that defines the committee's mandate in specific terms that commercial return cannot be a primary criteria regardless of who's in the room. Then I'd want your commercial instincts stress-testing every grant decision against sustainability criteria, because projects that can't sustain themselves past the grant period aren't serving the mandate either."

He looked at her keenly. "My grandmother was protecting the committee from one version of you. I'm interested in using a different version to make both of us succeed."

Patricia Ng looked at him for a long moment, and whatever she was measuring, he must have been close enough to the mark, because she picked up her tea and said, "I'll reconsider my position on the succession question."

"I appreciate that," he said.

He was in the elevator going down when his phone rang with a number he didn't recognize on the new device, which meant someone had gotten the number through the Harmon Group's switchboard. He frowned, his curiosity buzzing in his chest and decided to pick up. He heard a voice that did not entirely surprised him because he had known since the reception that this call was coming, only not quite this fast.

"Mr. Cole," said Reyna Voss. "My name is—"

"I know who you are," he cut in flatly.

There was a brief pause over the line. "Then you know why I'm calling."

"You want to know if the Harmon Group succession chaos is going to resolve or whether you need to start treating us as a distressed asset." Ethan said.

The voice on the line hesitated slightly, "That's a blunt way to put it."

"It's an accurate way to put it, Reyna."

She remained quiet for a moment then sighed, as if she'd given up. "I'd like to meet this week if possible."

"Thursday," he said. "Two o'clock. You will come to the Harmon Group, thirty-first floor."

"I'll be there," she said, and ended the call quickly.

The elevator reached the lobby. Ethan stepped out into the lobby, where he glanced at the portrait of his grandmother again. He had two board members moving back toward his side, a regulatory weapon aimed at Jordan Marsh, and a Voss Industries meeting on Thursday that could change the shape of the company's next decade.

What he did not have was any idea what Jordan Marsh was going to do next, and Jordan was not a man who took reversals quietly. The silence from him was not reassurance, it was the particular silence of something preparing to move.

He looked at his grandmother's portrait for another second.

Then he went back upstairs to work.