Chapter 12 - DIANE DID NOT FORGIVE QUICKLY
Recovery is not a cinematic montage.
Diane’s surgery saved her life, but it did not erase years of strain, poverty, or distrust.
She had to learn to walk longer distances without losing breath. She had to learn that bills were no longer coming for her recovery. She had to let strangers help her with forms, schedules, nutrition, and medicine.
Hardest of all, she had to live inside the knowledge that her father could have had safety, dignity, and time—and didn’t.
“Do you know what he used to say whenever something broke?” Diane asked Richard one evening.
“What?”
“He’d say, ‘We’re Mercer people. We fix what we can and carry the rest quietly.’”
Richard lowered his eyes.
“He carried too much quietly.”
“And you?”
“I asked too few questions when being comfortable was easier.”
That honesty didn’t fix anything.
But for the first time, Diane stopped looking at him as if he were only a suit shaped like guilt.
Meanwhile, Richard’s outside counsel and Diane’s new legal team reconstructed the Mercer claim properly. The numbers stabilized at a figure no board could dismiss:
Thomas Mercer’s equity, distributions, and related rights were worth $172 million, before additional claims for suppressed dividends and wrongful dilution.
Diane did not celebrate.
May you like
She cried in the rehab bathroom where Leo couldn’t see her.
Because people who have gone without for too long don’t trust abundance immediately. They expect it to vanish or turn cruel.
