“You’d destroy my company,” Ethan said, and the word destroy was stripped bare, the performance entirely gone, just a man looking at the edge of something he had spent years building. “You’d destroy everything I’ve built over—over this?”
Alexander met his eyes steadily. There was no cruelty in his expression. There was no satisfaction either. Just the calm of a man who has thought clearly about something and arrived at a position he is prepared to hold.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. I’m not doing anything to your company, Ethan. I’m simply withdrawing support I extended in good faith. What you’ve built, you built. And what you’ve done—to someone who helped you build it, during the years when building it was hard and uncertain and no one else believed in you—that, you also did. I’m not destroying anything. I’m removing something you never earned.”
He picked up the signed divorce papers from the table and held them for a moment, as though weighing them.
“The consequences of your choices belong to you. Not to me.”
He set the papers back down.