Chapter 12 - The Family Dinner
In the spring, Jack introduced me to the remaining, elder members of the Whitmore family council at a private estate in Cape Cod.
The council consisted of four older men and women who had run the family's traditional operations for decades under Jack's late father. They were skeptical, guarded, and terrified of the sweeping legal changes Jack and I were implementing across the entire corporate structure.
We sat around a massive mahogany dining table overlooking the ocean.
"The old ways protected us for fifty years, Jack," stated Uncle Thomas, a grey-haired man with thick glasses and a raspy voice. "Now you're handing over our financial ledgers to federal regulators and public shareholders! It's madness!"
"It's not madness, Thomas," I spoke up calmly, setting my fork down and looking straight at the old man. "It's survival."
The old council members looked at me with varying degrees of irritation.
"Under the old ways," I explained smoothly, pulling out a slim tablet and presenting a clear bar graph, "your average annual growth was four percent, heavily reduced by legal fees, extortion pay-offs, and federal investigation costs. Under our clean corporate restructuring, our legitimate holdings expanded thirty-two percent in the last two quarters alone."
I leaned forward, placing my hands flat on the table.
"You can stay in the shadows and wait for a federal prosecutor to take your homes, or you can step into the light and become legitimate billionaires whose grandchildren can walk into any university in the world without hiding their last names."
The long dining room fell completely silent.
Uncle Thomas looked at the numbers on the screen, then at Jack, and finally at me, a slow, begrudging smile spreading across his weathered face.
May you like
"She speaks well, Jack," Thomas grunted, picking up his wine glass. "And she's right. The old ways were exhausting."
Jack smiled, reaching under the table to squeeze my hand tightly beneath the linen cloth.
