The consulting pipeline that had quietly padded my father’s sales numbers was shut down, and because I now sat inside governance rather than outside it, an audit caught the exact degree to which his performance had been inflated by external factors he neither understood nor earned. He wasn’t fired publicly—Helena and I agreed we would not turn corporate transition into blood sport—but he was removed from his role, offered a quiet separation package, and advised that retirement would look more dignified than investigation. He took the package and told everyone at first that he had chosen to leave because the company was shifting away from “traditional values.”
My mother’s credit position collapsed within four months.