The heir they threw away

CHAPTER SIX

The reception filled the Harmon Group's fortieth-floor's event space, and it was exactly the kind of room that Jordan Marsh thought he was built for.

He moved through it the way he moved through every room, with the easy authority of a man who thought he had the world under his feet simply because he knew the names and knew who mattered. He knew all of it and he moved through it like water finding the fastest route downhill.

Arden Walsh had been receptive to him, so that was a start. Patricia Ng had been cooler but not closed. Jordan had two hours to close her before the announcements began.

Simone stood near the bar, holding a glass of white wine with both hands and watching the room with the focused attention she always had in places like this. She was good at reading rooms. It was one of the things he had liked about her initially before she became a means to an end, which was the actually the path most people followed in his life.

She had called him three times since that morning and he had deliberately answered on the third ring.

"Is it true..." she had said. "That Ethan...The Harmon Group."

"I found out this afternoon," he had told her. "I'm handling it."

"What does that mean, Jordan, what does handling it—"

"It means what I said. You will still come tonight and don't come looking panicked and all. You look wonderful and at your best when you look composed." He had paused. "I need you visible and steady. Can you do that?"

She had done it, in fact, she was doing it now, standing near the bar looking composed. He acknowledged her with a subtle smile and as he was crossing toward Patricia Ng when he heard the room change.

The focus in the room completely shifted when something unexpected enters. Jordan could instantly feel that something was wrong as the hairs at the back of his neck suddenly stood erect.

Ethan Cole was descending the short staircase from the mezzanine level with Nora at his side, and the room went completely still, watching with a quiet curiosity.

He was wearing a different suit than the one from that morning. This one was drk, precise, fitted perfectly to his body and oozing with wealth and affluence.

He moved without hurry, like a man who needed to prove asolutely nothing to anyone. He shook hands with Douglas Hale at the base of the stairs, and Jordan watched Douglas, who had been CFO of the Harmon Group for twenty years and who shook hands with only the most important, grip Ethan's hand with both of his.

Jordan's body turned cold at the ridiculous sight.

Simone had seen him too. He watched her face from across the room and saw the composure he had instructed her to wear crack slightly at the edges for a few, agonizing seconds.

Nora stepped to the microphone at the front of the room with her usual confidence.

"Thank you all for being here tonight," she started.

"My grandmother would have found this many people in one room deeply impractical. She would also have approved of the efficiency of combining a memorial reception with a business announcement, because she never wasted an occasion."

A small, genuine laugh moved through the room before she continued. "Before we hear from our partnership candidates this evening, I've been asked to make a prior announcement on behalf of the Harmon Group board."

She looked up from the microphone, her eyes piercing directly at Jordan, then she looked past him. "Effective as of six forty-seven this evening, the Harmon Group primary succession has been formally confirmed. The company's designated heir has returned and the charter mechanism has been executed." She paused, letting those words sink in. "I'd like to introduce the Harmon Group's new principal heir and majority shareholder. My brother, Ethan Cole."

The room was completely silent for a few seconds, everyone's eyes flying around in confusion and shock.

Ethan stepped forward without looking at anyone. Jordan Marsh stood in the center of the room and felt the ground shift beneath everything he had built on it. The Calloway contract. The forty million in green energy preferred terms and even Simone, the thread he had used to get close to a company whose heir he had not known existed.

He had spent four months building toward tonight and he was only realising now that he had built it all on sinking sand. Across the room, Simone was staring at her husband with a wide look of disbelief in her eyes, unable to accept what she'd been dreading all afternoon.

Ethan had reached the microphone and looked around the room. He caught Jordan's gaze and smiled like a man who knows he has already won and is in no rush to say it.

Then he looked away and began to speak.

"My grandmother built this company over fifty years go," he said. "She built it out of the belief that what you build should outlast you and should make the world incrementally less broken than you found it. I walked away from this company nine years ago because I believed we were failing that standard. I came back tonight because she spent nine years proving me wrong." He said.

"Just to put it out there, the Harmon Group is not for sale. It is not for partnership with anyone who does not share what my grandmother built it to be and tonight's announcements will reflect that."

He stepped back from the microphone and people didn't know whether to clap or not.

In the chair beside Arden Walsh, Jordan watched the board member's posture change immediately The receptiveness he had spent an hour building closed in his face like a door.

Jordan set down his scotch slowly, his heart pounding with fear and terror.

The room was already moving around Ethan, hands extended desperately to him and voices rising.  Jordan Marsh, who understood rooms, understood that this one was no longer his.

He looked at Simone for a moment, her eyes wide, regretful eyes were fixed on Ethan keenly.

He picked up his jacket and walked toward the exit, and for the first time in a very long time, Jordan Marsh left a room before he intended to.