29 — Damage Control

JAPHETH POV

By midnight, my father's dining room table had become a war room, which was a strange thing to witness happen to a table that had, as recently as Thanksgiving, hosted an argument about whether stuffing belonged inside the turkey or beside it.

"The story's already moving," said Priscilla Awosika, the crisis PR consultant Dad had called in sometime around eleven, a formidable woman in a blazer sharp enough to cut glass who'd clearly been woken from a dead sleep and had decided to be furious about it in a very professional, controlled way. "Two gossip columns have it as of forty minutes ago. 'Business partnership gone sour,' 'decade-old betrayal,' very dramatic language, deliberately vague on specifics, which tells me whoever's feeding it to them wants the mystery to do the work instead of the facts."

"That's Kade," Voss said, arriving somehow even at this hour in a full suit, looking like a man who considered sleep a weakness he hadn't yet gotten around to eliminating. "He wants speculation. Speculation's harder to correct than a direct lie."

"Charming strategy," Priscilla said dryly. "I almost respect it."

"Please don't respect the man trying to destroy my family," Dad said, rubbing his temples.

"Professionally respecting someone's tactics and personally wanting to destroy them aren't mutually exclusive, Sebastian. I contain multitudes." She pulled out a tablet, tapping through something quickly. "Here's what we're doing. We get ahead of it with our own version, tonight, before the morning cycle picks it up properly. Controlled statement, factual, boring enough that it doesn't give anyone a juicy angle to chase."

"Boring is good?" Kate asked, sitting pressed close to Dean, who'd shown up the second Japheth texted him despite having zero official reason to be in the room beyond being, apparently, part of the family crisis response team now.

"Boring is excellent. Nobody writes a viral headline about 'former business partners had an amicable, legally verified buyout eleven years ago.' That's the goal. We want this story to die of its own tedium."

"Can we actually say that, though?" I asked. "Amicable feels generous given tonight."

"We can say it was conducted through proper legal channels with independent valuation, which is true, and which happens to sound boring enough to kill momentum." Priscilla looked up from her tablet, fixing her gaze on Dad. "I do need the full history, though. Everything. I can't protect you from a story I don't fully understand myself."

Dad was quiet for a moment, and I watched Mom's hand find his under the table the way it had at the gala, steady, grounding.

"Tell her everything, Seb," Mom said quietly. "All of it. We can't fight a story about the past by hiding parts of it."

So he did — the partnership, the falling out, the buyout, the eleven years of silence that none of us had known was actually a held breath instead of genuine closure. Priscilla took notes without interrupting, occasionally typing something fast into her phone that I assumed was already becoming the statement.

"Okay," she said finally. "This is workable. Nothing you've described is remotely scandalous, legally or ethically. The real risk isn't the facts it's the emotional narrative Kade's trying to attach to them. 'Betrayed partner, cheated out of his fair share.' We need to counter the feeling, not just the facts."

"How do you counter a feeling?" Dean asked, genuinely curious, leaning forward with the particular focus of a lawyer encountering a problem outside his usual wheelhouse.

"Humanize the other side of the story. Show the valuation process was fair, show Kade's own signature on the documents at the time, agreeing to the terms without protest. Let the facts quietly imply that this is a man rewriting history eleven years later to fit a grudge, without us ever having to say that directly." Priscilla's smile was small, sharp, satisfied. "Juries hate direct accusations. Readers do too. Let them arrive at the conclusion themselves."

"You're genuinely terrifying," Kate said, sounding more admiring than alarmed.

"I get that a lot. It's mostly a compliment."

I looked over at Jasmine, who'd been quiet through most of the strategy session, studying the papers spread across the table with the particular focus she brought to any financial document, the same focus that had made her terrifyingly good at her actual job in record time.

"What are you looking at?" I asked.

"The original valuation report. From the buyout." She tapped the page. "This doesn't quite add up."

The room went quiet. Priscilla leaned in immediately, all business.

"What doesn't add up?"

"The valuation methodology used here assumes a static growth projection, which was standard for the time, but look at this footnote." She pointed. "It references anticipated market conditions that explicitly excluded the distribution deal that ended up tripling the company's value eighteen months later."

"That deal wasn't finalized until after the buyout," Dad said slowly, clearly working through what she was saying in real time.

"Right, but was it already in negotiation? Because if it was, even informally, and that context wasn't disclosed to Kade's side during the valuation…"

"That would be a material omission," Dean finished, sitting up straighter, lawyer instincts fully engaged now. "Not illegal, necessarily, depending on disclosure requirements at the time, but it would explain why he feels cheated even if the numbers were technically fair on paper."

Dad had gone very still, something complicated moving across his face.

"Dad?" I asked carefully.

"The distribution deal was in early talks," he admitted quietly. "Nothing formal. Nothing I was required to disclose. But I knew it was likely happening when we finalized the buyout."

The silence that followed was heavier than anything Victor Kade had managed to produce at the gala.

"So he's not entirely wrong," Jasmine said gently, not accusatory, just stating the thing nobody else seemed willing to say out loud. "He got a fair valuation on paper, but not a complete picture of where the company was actually headed. That's not the same as cheating him outright, but I can understand why it would feel like betrayal from his side, even eleven years later."

Dad put his head in his hands for a long moment, and Mom rubbed slow circles on his back, saying nothing, letting him sit with it.

"This changes the strategy," Priscilla said carefully, watching the room with the particular alertness of someone recalibrating in real time. "We can't spin this as entirely clean anymore. Not without risking exposure later that makes it look worse."

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"We get ahead of it honestly instead of defensively," Jasmine said, before Priscilla could answer, something steady and clear in her voice that made the whole room turn to look at her. "Seb acknowledges the timing was imperfect, offers Kade a legitimate settlement conversation not because the family's legally obligated to, but because it's the right thing to do, and because doing the right thing publicly is harder to attack than any defense ever could be."

Dad lifted his head slowly, looking at her properly for what felt like the first time all night.

"You want me to apologize. Publicly. To the man who just tried to destroy my family."

"I want you to be honest, publicly, which happens to include acknowledging something that was actually true. Those aren't the same as rewarding him for the threats, the blackmail, or tonight's ambush. Those still deserve real consequences, legal ones if we can manage it." Jasmine met his eyes steadily. "But if there's a real wound underneath his revenge, pretending there isn't one just gives him more ammunition to use against you later. Take it away from him instead."

Dad was quiet for a long moment, and then, slowly, something like respect settled into his expression.

"You're disturbingly good at this," he said finally.

"I had a good teacher," Jasmine said, glancing briefly at me, a small smile breaking through the tension. "Also several months of corporate finance training and an unreasonable amount of anxiety about being underestimated."

"We should hire her for strategy full time," Priscilla said, already typing furiously on her tablet, clearly building the actual plan around what Jasmine had just laid out.

"She's already employed, thank you," I said, pulling Jasmine's chair slightly closer to mine, equal parts pride and exhaustion settling over me as the night wore on toward whatever version of morning was waiting for all of us on the other side of this.

"For now," Priscilla said, with the particular glint of someone already plotting a recruitment pitch for later, and despite everything Kade, the gala, the valuation report that had just rewritten eleven years of family history in the space of five minutes I found myself, improbably, almost laughing.

The meeting wound down slowly after that, Priscilla gathering her things with the brisk efficiency of someone who had a statement to draft before sunrise, Voss and Dad retreating into a quieter conversation by the window that looked, for once, less like adversaries negotiating and more like two men who'd simply decided to actually be on the same side.

"You okay?" I asked Jasmine quietly, once most of the room had cleared out, leaving just the two of us and the wreckage of coffee cups and printed documents scattered across the table.

"Honestly? Terrified I just told your father he needs to publicly admit fault in front of the entire business world."

"You told him the truth. There's a difference."

"Is there, though? At one in the morning, after the day we've had, it's getting hard to tell."

I pulled her into my side, pressing a kiss to her temple. "For what it's worth, I think you just saved us from a much worse version of this story. The one where Dad gets painted as a liar covering his tracks instead of a man who made an imperfect decision eleven years ago and is finally willing to own it."

"I hope you're right."

"I usually am, eventually, after an embarrassing number of wrong turns first." That got a tired laugh out of her, exactly what I'd been hoping for. "Come on. Let's go home. Actual sleep exists, allegedly, and I'd like to test that theory before the sun comes up and Priscilla's statement goes live and this entire day starts over again."

"That sounds suspiciously optimistic given everything that just happened."

"I contain multitudes," I said, echoing Priscilla's line from earlier, and Jasmine's exhausted laugh followed us all the way out the door, the two of us leaning on each other down the hallway, Derek falling into step a respectful distance behind, the whole strange, overwhelming night finally, mercifully, beginning to wind toward whatever came next.