Chapter 5
I called Elias immediately.
He was on the roof in two minutes, checking the fire escape.
The nanny was fired before the sun came up.
The security team was doubled.
New locks.
New alarm system.
24/7 guards inside the suite, not just outside.
But Lila wouldn’t let go of me for three days.
She slept in my bed, curled into my side, her hand fisted in my shirt.
She refused to go to the bathroom alone.
Refused to be in a room with the door closed.
Every time the phone rang, she flinched.
I pulled her out of her school the next week.
The other parents had seen the news.
Some had sent nasty notes to the principal, saying a “broken home” was a bad influence on their kids.
I hired a private tutor, a warm former teacher named Ms. Lee who loved art and science and made Lila laugh within 10 minutes of meeting her.
Slowly, slowly, Lila started to relax.
But the damage was done.
Every time Mark’s name was mentioned, she went pale.
Every time she saw an older woman with gray hair on the street, she hid behind my legs.
I threw myself into the Langford acquisition.
It was the only thing keeping me from going over the edge.
Elias and I worked 16-hour days, going through every line of the company’s books, meeting with department heads, locking down the final share purchases.
We were 72 hours from closing.
From owning 51% of Langford Group.
From being untouchable.
Then Elias walked into my office one afternoon, his face grim.
He threw a stack of papers on my desk.
“Voss is back,” he said.
I flipped through the papers.
Roland Voss, the corporate raider Helen had tried to sell to before.
He wasn’t going away.
He’d spent the last two weeks buying up every small block of Langford shares he could find.
From retired employees.
From widows.
From small investors who’d seen the news and gotten scared.
He now owned 14.9% of the company.
Just under the 15% threshold that would force him to make a formal tender offer.
And he’d just filed a lawsuit.
He was claiming my acquisition was “predatory” and “anti-competitive.”
He was asking a judge to block the vote indefinitely.
“Helen is behind this,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “She’s funding him. She’s giving him the names of the small shareholders. She wants to delay this long enough to break me.”
Elias nodded.
“Worse,” he said. “He’s got a hearing on the injunction day after tomorrow. The judge assigned is the same one who threw out Claire’s police report 20 years ago. He owes Helen’s family a favor. He’ll grant it. We’ll be stuck in court for months. Maybe years. Voss will keep buying shares. By the time it’s over, he’ll own more than us.”
I thought fast.
We had two options.
Fight the injunction.
Lose.
Or go over Voss’s head.
Straight to the people whose shares he was buying.
“Get me a list of every single small shareholder he’s approached,” I said. “Every widow, every retiree, every former employee. I want names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Everything.”
Elias raised an eyebrow.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to them,” I said. “One by one. Face to face.”
For the next 48 hours, I didn’t sleep.
I drove all over the state.
Knocked on doors.
Sat in kitchen tables.
Drank bad coffee with 70-year-old men who’d worked on Langford’s factory floor for 40 years.
Held the hands of widows whose husbands had given their whole lives to the company.
I told them the truth.
About Voss.
About how he bought companies, closed factories, threw people out on the street with no severance, no pensions.
About how I’d grown up poor, how my mom had worked in a factory just like Langford’s, how I’d spent my whole life building companies that took care of their people.
I showed them my plan for Langford.
Raises.
Better benefits.
New factories.
No layoffs.
Ever.
One by one, they agreed.
They pulled their shares from Voss.
Sold them to me.
At the same price he’d offered.
Sometimes less.
Because they believed me.
By the morning of the injunction hearing, Voss’s stake had dropped to 4.2%.
He didn’t have enough shares to even file the lawsuit anymore.
The judge threw it out before Mara even opened her mouth.
We walked out of the courthouse victorious.
I was 24 hours from closing the Langford deal.
24 hours from winning.
I was checking my phone in the car, reading the congratulatory emails, when my personal line rang.
It was Ms. Lee.
Lila’s tutor.
May you like
Her voice was screaming, panicked, so loud I could barely understand her.
“She’s gone!” she yelled. “I turned my back for two minutes to get a book from the car, and when I came back, she was gone! The front gate was open! Someone took her! Oh my god, someone took Lila!”
