“From what I read, you did fight. Hard.”
“I did. I put everything I had into it, literally. But, as I said before, Teddy had deeper pockets than I did. And pricier lawyers.”
Morgan shot her a glance, but she was smiling, albeit tightly. “If it hadn’t been your family firm, it would have been one equally cutthroat.” She winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. They are.”
“The thing is, it should never have come to lawyers and lawsuits. I should have known, should have seen it coming, but I just—”
“You trusted your brother-in-law, your family. It didn’t all rest on your shoulders; you didn’t have complete control. Your sister had half of it, didn’t she? I mean, she’s responsible for how she handled her part, and you’re—”
“Trixie never had a clue about the business and didn’t want one. I think the reason I never saw it coming is that Teddy is from a family almost as old as yours, with easily as much money. I think that’s why my family welcomed him into the fold. Not because we liked him personally, all that much. He can be a bit . . . overbearing. But he honestly seemed to love my sister, and we knew he wasn’t after her money, because he had more than enough for several lifetimes. That’s what blinded me. Even though we became a successful family, we poured a lot of our earnings back into the business, and family always came first. The money was security. We lived very comfortably, but not ostentatiously.” She smiled. “We’re strong Irish stock and being frugal was also a big Bellamy tradition.”
“Hence the twenty-four crayon pack.”
She laughed outright. “Exactly.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“No, although my sister would beg to differ. But, see, even there, we thought, hey, this solves everything. Teddy could—and did—give her the life she’d always thought she deserved, and we didn’t have to worry about someone taking advantage of her, and by extension, us.
“I just never saw it. Teddy was very aggressive in business. He wasn’t just a name on the letterhead; he had a part in continuing the growth of his family fortune. When Trixie turned over her share of our pie company to him to handle, rather than me, I was okay with it. He demonstrated very quickly that he understood what he was doing, and seemed truly and sincerely interested. In that regard, I actually respected him. He seemed devoted to his part in the company, to the family, and though we differed in some ways, especially where it came to tradition and not everything having to be bigger, better, faster, I honestly thought he understood what Mamie Sue’s was all about.”
“If you respected his ideas, his decisions, it stands to reason you’d trust him.”
“We had different goals, but I trusted his business acumen. He was all about Mamie Sue’s making more money and I was about keeping it grounded in what we believed in, why we were in business in the first place. We had our struggles, our boardroom debates, but there was always balance, and I always felt, when push came to shove, he deferred to my ideas and decisions. Ultimately, he worked for his family full-time, and his work for us was just a sideline, something he did for his wife, and because, frankly, he was good at it. I knew he equated success with the bottom line, but I never thought he’d actually undermine us.”
“That’s because it was never about the money to you, so you don’t understand the mind-set,” Morgan said, not unkindly. “It’s hard for someone who is living well, doing well, who feels happy and successful to understand that not everyone is motivated by living well and being happy. Someone like Teddy—I don’t know the man, but I know many like him—sees growing a company as a contest, even if it’s just with himself.”
“But we were a big, successful company already. He certainly didn’t need more money. We didn’t need more money. I mean, we wanted to keep growing, but we weren’t failing. We were doing well.”
“It’s not about greed or saying you have
x
amount more money in your bank account than before,” Morgan said. “It’s about winning. Conquering. Owning, controlling. Not because you need to, but because you can. Because you’re good at it. It’s like a climber can’t look at a mountain and not want to climb it. Teddy looked at Mamie Sue’s and . . . couldn’t help himself. That’s how his mind works. Money and growing the bottom line is how the contest is measured. It’s not because he needed more or even wanted more.”
You’re right. I don’t get that. I didn’t then and I don’t now. How can a well-educated, smart man destroy something that meant so much to so many people? It was his own family. Well, his wife’s family. Would he have done that to his own family business? I understand that he’s good at making companies make as much money as they possibly can, but he could and did do that in his own world. Why do it to ours? Why do it to ours if it meant dismantling what we’d worked so hard for? Tearing it apart meant nothing to him.”
“You said your sister never wanted the business, maybe . . . well, I don’t want to say something out of line here, but—”
“No. I know what you’re going to say, and I’ve asked myself the same thing. Did he sell off the family business because Trixie couldn’t be bothered with it? It wasn’t like Trixie actively wanted out, not that I knew about anyway. She was never in. She never had to lift a finger for the company. Teddy could have managed her shares hardly lifting a finger, if he’d chosen to. It’s not that I never felt overwhelmed by the responsibility that had been so suddenly thrust on us—well, on me. I did, all the time. But I was handling it, and would have continued to do so, single-handedly and gladly. He could have left all of that to me and kept his focus on his own damn job. But it was like—”
“Crack to an addict,” Morgan interjected.
“Exactly!”
“I know you don’t get it, Kit, and that’s a good thing. You’re not supposed to get it. I never got it. People like Teddy and my own mother are all about the game. That is life to them. That’s what makes it exciting and what feeds them. It’s not about people—never something as emotional and human as that. People are too challenging and emotions are messy. Better to rise above all that and stay in that place where you can control everything in your environment. Then it all becomes like an elaborate, wily chess game. For those people, the stakes of day-to-day life just aren’t high enough. They’re born into money and know they’re never going to lose everything. They’re always going to live a comfortable life. So, they have to get their thrills somewhere.”
“You make it all sound so—”
“Clinical? Cold? Unfeeling? It is. Or it certainly can be, if that’s your mind-set. If Teddy is as much like my mother as it sounds, I’m sure what he did wasn’t personal to him. He probably is as clueless about why this hurts you as you are to how he could do such a thing in the first place.”
“Yes, he is completely clueless! You’re exactly right. He was utterly blown away that I was going to fight the sale to Tas-T-Snaks. He couldn’t fathom why I’d do that. My share of the buyout was quite healthy. I don’t know what the heck he thought I’d do with a pile of money and no family business, but—”
“That’s just it. He never would have thought of it that way. He’d figure you’d either do like your sister and enjoy your new life of leisure, or turn around and jump into some new game.”
She slumped back in her seat and sighed ruefully. “Well, I guess he was right on that score. I had to jump somewhere.”
Morgan shot her a wide grin. “Yeah. You don’t strike me as a rest-on-her-big-buyout-payoff type.”
She could have told him she wasn’t the rest-on-her-broke-ass type either, but that really wasn’t any of his business. After racking up legal bills that eclipsed her share of the buyout, she’d put her share of the family house up for collateral. In the end, she’d lost, and the lawyers had taken her buyout payoff and everything she had left, including her share of the house after Teddy and Trixie sold it.
The lawyers had told her if she’d been fighting anyone else, they’d have had a good chance. The legal fees alone were daunting, but since Teddy had deep pockets, he could go in for the long haul and not get hurt. Beating her in court was just the cost of doing business, no matter the fees involved.
Her financial adviser, in his last act before she had to let him go, too—no need for one when there was nothing left to advise on—had told her she should be grateful she wasn’t in debt to her lawyers, the IRS, or anyone else. She was starting over from scratch, sure, but, hey, she wasn’t in the hole. She was still having a hard time being all rosy about that. “That’s the part that kills me the most.”
“What part is that?”
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. “Oh. Sorry. I was just—”
She really didn’t want to talk about it. She was afraid she’d cry again. But she’d worked up a fair head of steam and as he’d said, talking about it, especially with someone who wasn’t connected to it . . . She chuckled at the irony.
“What?” he asked.
“I was thinking I didn’t want to explain, because it would likely make me cry. That’s so becoming and all, plus, just what the designated driver in any road trip wants, a crying navigator.”
“I don’t want to make anyone cry, but if you want to talk it out—”
“That’s what made me laugh. I was also thinking that you were right, talking about it was kind of a relief. Specifically, talking to someone who wasn’t involved. And then I thought . . . how odd, that I’m unloading on a Westlake, of all people, about this particular tragedy.”
“Maybe that’s your karmic payoff,” he said, laughing himself.
“More of those ‘mysterious ways,’ huh?”
He shrugged. “Might be. But I’m not connected, really, so . . . fire away.”
“Well, it may be my karmic payoff, but it’s certainly not yours to have to listen to it.”
He looked at her, his expression open, easy and simply asked, “So, what was the part that killed you the most?”
She held his gaze for a moment; then he had to look back to the road. She kept looking at him, though. He really was a decent, good guy. And a Westlake. If that was karma, she didn’t want to know how they’d gotten to this point.
After an extended silence, she answered his question. “Losing the house. If I had to choose between pie business or house, I’d have chosen the pie business. Which I did, and that’s why I put my share of the house up during the court battle.”
“What happened to it?”
“I couldn’t buy my share back, so . . . it’s gone.”
“Gone, gone?”
“Trixie owned the other half and she’s always hated it. She considered it an embarrassment to what she perceived as her social standing. It was a ramshackle, crazy house. It sat on a fair amount of property, though, and I guess I thought, if anything, maybe she’d just give it a giant makeover once it was all hers.”
“But half went to your lawyers. Did they force a sale to get their share? Surely Teddy could have just bought them—”
“Oh, trust me, it never came to that. Trixie had it on the market almost before the judge’s final rap of the gavel had finished echoing in the courtroom.” Kit folded her arms loosely around her waist, looked out the window, but didn’t really see anything. “I miss the business like crazy. But I’m getting back some of the personal fulfillment I got from it, here with the new bakery. Entirely different, but it’s filling that void, as much as anything ever could, anyway.”
“It’s a much smaller endeavor.”
“Yeah, but, I don’t know . . . it suits me. Suits my life as it is now, or maybe it would have always suited me. After all I’ve been through, it’s about as much responsibility as I want. I can work with Lani and Baxter; make sure to do whatever I need to, to make her vision a success. But I’m not responsible for hundreds of employees’ livelihoods, and I’m okay with that.” She snorted. “I’m sure the employees of the world are sleeping more soundly because of that, too. I’m hardly a good risk as an employer these days.”
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to go through what you went through, but I know you’re being too hard on yourself. And if Mamie Sue’s employees knew you, and knew what was really going on . . . well, I can’t imagine they blame you, either.”
“Well, they’re certainly not cheering the fact that I lost the company to a corporation that had no intention of retaining any of them.”
“Still—” He decided not to push it, turning to sympathy instead. “I’m sorry you lost the house, too.”
“In the scope of karmic fairness, a lot of my former employees ended up losing theirs when they couldn’t find work after the layoff, so . . . it is what it is. I shouldn’t complain.”
“You’re not complaining. You’re mourning—as are they. No matter how it all came down, you’re human and you lost everything that mattered to you. You’re allowed to grieve without feeling guilty about that, too.”
She looked at him. “Do you ever miss what you’ve let go? Do you ever feel like it’s unfair that you had to give up everything to take on this new role?”
He slowed the truck and stopped at a red light, then looked directly at her. “For a long time, I felt guilty for wanting out of my family and the family business. I don’t, anymore. I took a lot of flak from the extended clan for taking Lilly away from my mother . . . but you’d have to know my mother to understand it’s not as cruel a thing as it appears to be. My family was only upset because of how it might look to others. If anything, it’s been a blessing to my mother, not having to deal with raising a small child and what a painful reminder Lilly is to her. You have to realize, she doesn’t view people as . . . well, people.”