Chapter 6 - I Had Asked My Father to Save the Company Because of People I Had Never Met
This was the part Ryan liked to mock later.
“You’re acting righteous now, but you begged Daddy to bail us out.”
He was partly right.
I had called Charles.
Mercer Home Group employed roughly 180 people across California, Nevada and Arizona.
Warehouse employees.
Design staff.
Sales teams.
Installation crews.
People with mortgages and children who had nothing to do with Ryan’s marriage or Diane’s arrogance.
When Ryan first admitted the company might miss payroll within months, I called Dad.
“Would you at least look?”
He said:
“No favors.”
“I’m not asking for one.”
“You are.”
“Then make it a good investment.”
That was the beginning.
Charles’s firm spent nearly ten weeks doing diligence.
The original rescue terms were tough:
$8.5 million senior secured financing,
independent board observer,
monthly cash reporting,
no related-party repayments without consent,
limits on owner compensation,
a twelve-month turnaround plan.
Ryan complained Charles wanted too much:
control.
I told him:
“You’re asking for eight and a half million dollars.”
Diane called the terms insulting.
Then begged Charles not to withdraw them.
Contradiction.
Now I understood why Ryan wanted me to stay through closing.
I was not merely wife and mother.
I was his connection to the only investor willing to move quickly enough.
Then Lauren’s role became clearer.
She was not some mastermind.
During formal review, she produced her consulting records voluntarily after hiring her own attorney.
She said Ryan told her our marriage was:
effectively over.
“He said you were only living together for the baby.”
I stared at her.
“When?”
“About seven months ago.”
Grace was not even born then.
Ryan had been laying the groundwork while I was:
pregnant.
Lauren continued.
“He said you had agreed to separate after the company financing.”
“I agreed six weeks ago.”
Her face changed.
Ryan had lied to:
both of us.
Did that make her innocent?
No.
By the later months, she knew he was still married and living with me.
She still walked into Diane’s house holding his hand.
But the story Ryan told her was not the same one he told:
me.
Then Lauren showed us the message that finally destroyed his claim that he wanted to repair our marriage.
Two months before the dining-room scene, Ryan wrote:
Once Charles funds, I’ll have room to deal with Emma properly. Until then I need the family picture stable.
Lauren asked:
Does she know that?
Ryan:
She knows enough.
I did not.
Then came a second message.
Lauren:
Your mother hates her. Why make Emma keep living there?
Ryan:
Because Mom can keep her in line better than I can while I’m at work.
That sentence explained the dirty plates.
Diane’s cruelty had not always been spontaneous.
Ryan knew about it.
Sometimes he relied on:
it.
Then the restructuring adviser called with a discovery that linked Diane even more directly to the rescue scheme.
The $1.25 million “shareholder loan” she wanted repaid was not entirely her money.
Nearly half of it had originally come from Mercer Home Group itself through a circular series of advances several years earlier.
If the accounting held, Diane was trying to make the company repay her for money that may already have belonged to the:
May you like
company.
---
