Surveying the options on the counter, Emery looked deeply disappointed. "Milk and cereal? I thought the one good thing that would come of this insistence on breakfast would be your coffee."
"I know you love my coffee. I also know it's not wise to give coffee to someone who can't reliably answer the question of when they last ate. I'm not drinking any either in solidarity, which is the best you'll get. Now eat your cereal."
"I'm not a child."
"No, a child would be less stubborn. Eat the damn cereal unless you'd prefer the rest of last night's soup for breakfast."
Emery sneered but mercifully started eating.
"Anyway," Josh continued, "what were you saying about Roger?"
"Right. He thought I'd be back in a few weeks; a month, perhaps. I was away for almost a year. Some clients left us — it's understandable; if they wanted their money to stay put they might as well have stashed it under the mattress. Roger had his own money heavily invested in the firm as well, as did I, and he got antsy. One day I guess he decided he could try his hand at it, on a small scale."
Emery played with his spoon, watching milk ebb and flow from one side of the bowl to the other as if nothing were quite as interesting. He sounded removed from his retelling.
"If he'd lost money then everything would have worked out, but he got lucky. He saw some returns and figured he was suddenly a financial genius. So he risked more and more — I studied the whole train wreck for my trial — until he found what he must have thought was a sure thing. That's why you shouldn't invest if you don't know what you're doing — I could have told him it was far from a sure thing; I could have seen the potential risks coming a mile away. But he couldn't, and he lost a great deal of money. A great deal."
Josh couldn't eat his own breakfast, enthralled by the contrast between Emery's distant voice and the look of sharp regret in his eyes.
"I still might have saved the company if he'd come to me — it'd take admitting to clients what had happened, asking for permission to invest the rest over a period of two or three years, but I could have balanced it. But he knew I'd have made him come clean. He knew I'd have turned him in.
"So instead he panicked. He took the rest of the money and vanished. He left nothing behind, not even in the accounts of our most vulnerable clients — he just took everything and ran."
Something Emma had told him suddenly clicked in Josh's mind. "And you had your silly romantic ideals."
Emery's head snapped up. "I'm sorry?"
"That's something Emma once said, when I assumed she had as much money as you did. That she'd pulled her share of the money from the company long ago because she didn't need to be a millionaire, and you had your silly romantic ideals. That even the house was tied to the company and what she had was enough to take care of both of you if something happened that made you realize you couldn't control everything. That's what her money was for."
Emery closed his eyes for a moment, his face a mask of grief. When he opened them again he seemed to be struggling to get his emotions under control. "I believe she feared recession more than she did Roger but yes, I can imagine her saying that. They weren't silly romantic ideals — I had absolute faith in every decision I made. If I weren't prepared to take the same risks as my clients, how could I ask them to trust me with their lives' savings?"
This. This was why it was so hard to dismiss Emery as just a stubborn hedgehog, this was why people waited in line for him to take their money and make it grow. This integrity, the strength of his character, how he'd never ask anyone to do anything he wouldn't do himself. And this was why it was so very hard for Josh to forget him, in spite of... The rest. In spite of the rest. "Was Roger's house tied up in it too?"
Emery's answering smile was subdued. "Like I said, he was a lawyer. He had the house in Annie's — his wife's — name. The house is still hers, thankfully. She had nothing to do with his actions and didn't deserve to be caught in the fallout."
"You lost everything and they banned you for it." The unfairness of it all left him incensed, the spoon clattering messily on the half-eaten bowl of cereal.
Emery seemed perfectly calm about his fate. "I shouldn't have given him power of attorney to begin with."
Always the weight of everyone's responsibility on his shoulders. "But didn't... Wasn't..."
"What?"
"I don't really know how to say this without sounding offensive."
"I'm sure I don't have to tell you that my own approach has always been to simply say things without fear of offending."
Josh felt like he'd been punched, jaw clenching. It helped him do away with his outrage on Emery's behalf considerably faster than he'd otherwise have managed. "No, you don't. Okay then: weren't there people who owed you favors? Strings you could pull so you wouldn't be banned from doing what you do best? The general idea I have is that rules bending for wealthy people is the norm."
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