Chapter 11 - The Fall on Wall Street
Once Nora filed the amended ownership action and Victor’s side enforced the debt default, Channing Capital entered free fall.
Not dramatic movie free fall.
Real New York free fall.
Phones stopped returning calls.
Outside counsel demanded an emergency board meeting.
A lender froze access to a revolving facility pending governance clarification.
Two senior analysts quietly updated their résumés.
By Friday morning, Derek was placed on administrative leave by his own board while the ownership dispute, forgery allegations, and disclosure failures were investigated.
Tiffany disappeared from the picture so completely that I suspected she had practiced for moments like this.
Derek sent one final angry email through his attorney claiming I was destroying jobs out of personal bitterness. Nora’s reply was surgical: any employment instability resulted from his failure to disclose controlling claims, forged consents, and capital-structure defects.
She copied the board.
That afternoon, one of the board members—a woman named Priya Shah—asked to meet me. I expected suspicion. Instead, I found exhaustion.
“We kept getting stories from Derek that never quite lined up,” she told me over coffee. “But he always had paperwork.”
“Some of it was mine,” I said.
She nodded grimly. “That’s what frightens us.”
The board’s primary concern, naturally, was survival. The employees had done nothing wrong. The portfolio companies still needed oversight. The firm still had obligations.
For the first time, the story shifted from what Derek had done to me to what I was going to do with what remained.
When I told Dante that night that I didn’t want revenge to wreck innocent people, he said something I never forgot.
“That’s the difference between power you inherit and power you deserve,” he said. “One lets you punish. The other forces you decide what should survive.”
It was not a romantic line.
It was better.
May you like
It was respect.
And it was exactly what I needed before making the hardest decision of the entire mess.
