Chapter 30 Seamus
Chapter thirty
Seamus
I'm reviewing quarterly reports Friday morning when the email comes through from Graham. Subject line: "Heritage Street - Updated Bid."
My stomach drops.
I read it three times, and each time the meaning stays the same. They did it. They filed the new bid, submitted the demolition permits, set the whole machine in motion.
Without telling me until it was done.
Except that's not quite true, is it?
They told me this was coming. Malcolm laid it all out for me multiple times—the timeline, the strategy, the need to move fast before historical designation could complicate things. I sat there and listened.
I didn't approve, but I didn't object either. I just stayed silent and let them interpret my silence as consent.
And that's all they needed. Not my approval—just my failure to stop them.
I let the board decide while I hid behind plausible deniability. I was protecting myself from having to choose between the company and Rosanna by simply not choosing.
I pull up the city planning portal and find the filing.
It's all there. Clean. Efficient. The kind of maneuver my father would have praised.
The machine is in motion, and stopping it now would mean fighting my own company, overriding board decisions and admitting that I've let my personal life interfere with professional judgment.
Everything I've been trying to avoid since this marriage began.
I click through the permit applications, and the timeline is aggressive—ruthlessly so.
Thirty days to final approval if everything goes smoothly. Another fifteen for demolition prep. The building could be gone in six weeks, reduced to rubble before the end of the quarter.
But it's the historical designation timeline that tightens my chest. Rosanna's application is still pending—I checked last week.
The historical preservation committee meets in three weeks.
If they approve the designation, it would trigger a mandatory review period, environmental impact assessments, community input sessions.
The bureaucratic protections that could slow or stop the demolition.
Which is exactly why Graham and Malcolm are moving so fast. They don't need to fight the historical designation—they just need to outrun it.
Get the permits approved, start demolition, create facts on the ground that make preservation moot.
By the time the committee meets to consider Rosanna's application, there won't be a building left to designate.
It's brilliant strategy. Cold, calculated, and completely legal. The kind of move that business schools would use as a case study in effective corporate maneuvering.
It's also going to destroy my wife.
I think about yesterday—the picnic in the park, the chess games, the way she laughed when I captured her queen. The kiss that felt real, unguarded, like maybe we were finally finding our way to something honest.
And the whole time, this filing was being prepared.
Graham and Malcolm were drafting documents and submitting permits while I was setting up a romantic afternoon, and I didn't know. Didn't ask. Didn't want to know.
My phone buzzes. A text from Malcolm:
Let me know if you need talking points for any press inquiries.
Talking points. As if Rosanna is a PR problem instead of the woman I’m falling in love with.
Like the building she's fighting for is just an obstacle in our development timeline rather than something that matters deeply to the community she cares about.
I stare at my phone, and I know what I should do. She should hear it from me.
But I can't make myself dial her number. Because what would I even say?
Rosanna, my company just filed to demolish the building you're trying to save. I didn't approve it, but I also didn't stop it. I've known for weeks that this was coming, and I didn't tell you.
I imagine her face when she finds out. The way the hope will drain from her eyes, replaced by the kind of understanding that changes everything.
She'll realize that the picnic yesterday was me trying to create good memories before everything fell apart. That every moment we've shared has been shadowed by my failure to choose her when it mattered.
The rational part of my brain tries to construct justifications.
I didn't know the exact timing.
Graham and Malcolm moved forward without my explicit approval.
The board made this decision collectively, and overriding them would require evidence that it's bad for the company, which I don't have because objectively, it's sound business strategy.
But all the justifications feel hollow.
Because the truth is simpler and worse: I let this happen. I saw it coming and I stayed quiet because confronting it would have forced me to choose, and choosing meant risk.
Risk that I'd lose the company my father built.
Risk that I'd prove the board right about my judgment being compromised by marriage.
Risk that even if I fought for Rosanna, she'd realize I was too damaged to be worth fighting for.
So I chose silence and plausible deniability and the hope that somehow this would all work out without me having to actually take a stand.
***
I sit in my expensive office in my expensive penthouse with my expensive justifications, and I wait for the moment when she'll find out what kind of man she married.
A man who had a choice and made the wrong one. A man who protected himself instead of protecting her. A man who's about to lose the only real thing he's had in years, and whose only consolation is that at least he'll still have the company.
My father would be proud.