Chapter 8 - The Price of Pride
The legal consequences followed with terrifying speed.
Following the public scene at the Drake, the Securities and Exchange Commission formally initiated civil proceedings against Grant Mercer for insider trading and corporate embezzlement during his tenure at Halcyon. Facing mounting legal debts, Grant was forced to liquidate his remaining retirement accounts just to retain a public defender.
His mistress, Chloe Bennett, cut a cooperation deal with the prosecutors, testifying that Grant had pressured her into leaking internal acquisition files to give him personal leverage during executive restructuring.
Within six months, Grant was completely broke.
The court handed down a three-year suspended sentence, five hundred hours of community service, and ordered full restitution of the one hundred and forty thousand dollars he had embezzled from Halcyon. Barred from the financial industry for life, Grant took a job cleaning maintenance bays at an auto parts warehouse on the outskirts of Gary, Indiana.
Every evening, aching in his steel-toed boots and smelling of motor oil and degreaser, he walked past newsstands showing magazines featuring Northstar’s continued global expansion.
Evelyn was on the cover of Forbes, named Philanthropist of the Year.
He remembered her hands—the hands that used to plant hydrangeas in their small garden, the hands that used to pack his lunch before his early morning flights. He remembered the quiet dinners, the way she used to laugh at his terrible jokes, and how safe he had felt in the early days when he was just an insecure boy from Milwaukee who had nothing.
She had possessed enough power to lift him to the stars. She would have shared every single penny, every connection, every ounce of her brilliance with him if he had simply treated her with love and decency.
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Instead, he had demanded a trophy wife to flatter his ego, only to discover he had been married to the queen of the board.
The regret wasn't sharp anymore. It was a dull, crushing weight that sat on his chest every time he woke up on his twin cot in a run-down apartment, listening to the sirens outside. He had won the exact life his cruelty deserved.
