Chapter 50
O f all the things I wanted to hear, “we should talk,” was pretty close to the top for the worst three words anyone could hear.
I was used to hearing them in the context of a relationship with a girl, but hearing them in business was just as troubling.
I don’t think anyone in history had ever heard good news from those words—and if they had, it had come in a joking manner, as if setting the stage for something serious, only for it to get humorous and good-natured quickly.
But Morgan didn’t play this game. When he was funny, he was funny. When he was serious, he was serious. He didn’t hide his emotions well, and he didn’t like to jut from one extreme to the other. This was not going to be a fun conversation.
“I take it you heard what happened with my father,” Morgan said.
“The conversation, you mean?”
“Yes,” Morgan continued. “You have it all?”
“On a USB stick, yep.”
“I see,” Morgan said. “There’s something you need to be aware of, Chance. I don’t want to lose my father. You say you know that, and I know I’ve said that before. But I don’t think you understand to what extent this is true.”
As much as I hated to say, I could believe it. Just as Morgan had never understood my life, I had never really understood his, so it wasn’t delusional to say that I couldn’t appreciate what he and the elder Hunt had.
“If you listened closely during the conversation, you heard him say some nice things to me.”
“I also heard him say some terrible things about me.”
Morgan nodded, validating my perspective.
“Won’t argue that. Won’t also argue that this needs to stop.”
“You know he was playing bullshit with you, right?” I said, feeling my anger start to grow. “You know that when he said he knew nothing about the constant phone calls and stalking that he was, at best, just distancing himself. Surely he knows some of it.”
“Yeah, I don’t doubt it. But listen, Chance, seriously.
Listen. We need to take this slow. My father is an old man.
He won’t be around forever and he won’t be in business for any longer period of time.
My best guess is that he’ll be around as CEO for another three, four years while he searches for a successor that isn’t me and then he steps down.
And then that’s it. Hunt Industries is now just a name, not a legacy. He won’t have—”
“I’m gonna stop you right there,” I said.
I was getting frustrated with Morgan’s waffling.
I was tired of him wanting to please both of us.
I understood it, but it wasn’t helping us in any way.
He needed to pick a side, and if he chose Edwin’s side, I had to keep my investments and I had to keep MCH afloat.
I’d let Morgan keep his percentage of the investment, but I would have to be able to operate the thing without his presence.
Which… yeah, easier said than done.
“There’s blood in the water, Morgan,” I said. “What he said about John Burnson said it all.”
“You mean—”
“Oh, yes, that was the golden nugget I was hoping to receive. We can use that as leverage.”
“How? You crazy? You think my father would be afraid of something like that?”
“That’s…”
It was here that I began to realize I could no longer tell Morgan all of my plans in full detail. That hurt and it made me wish I could, but I just couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut with everything going on. He was in on the plan to take over Edwin Hunt, but he wasn’t in on all the details.
He was just too close to the enemy. And while I loved Morgan, I loved my own position and standing in life a little more. I didn’t care to sacrifice one for the other, and I would never risk losing Morgan’s brotherhood even if I kept pursuing MCH. The reverse, though, wasn’t true.
“I just think we need to hang on to it. You never know when it will come in handy.”
“You sound like you want it to come in handy sooner rather than later,” Morgan said.
Now his voice was starting to rise. Tensions were beginning to flair between us. It wasn’t ugly yet, far from it, but I could see that one of us had to pull back and make peace, and it wasn’t going to be Morgan.
“I am just saying that we don’t want to discard any options prematurely,” I said, raising my hands to try and calm him down.
“I don’t want us to get into a spot where we wish we had something and we didn’t because we decided to get rid of it out of fear it would be ineffective or something like that. ”
Morgan snorted through his nostrils but said nothing. He took a seat on the couch about three feet over from me, putting his feet up on the coffee table. He appeared to be watching the TV, but I knew better that he was just thinking about everything.
“I’m worried we’ve lost our whole reason for doing this in the first place,” Morgan said. “Why did we start MCH? Morgan & Chance Holdings? Why did it start?”
“So we could be our own bosses, obviously,” I said.
“No disagreement there, that’s what I thought,” Morgan said. “So what are we spending most of our time on right now?”
“I spent some time mentoring Andrew—”
“Chance,” Morgan said like a teacher about to deliver a warning. “Don’t be so stubborn that you can’t answer my actual question.”
Goddamnit. I know where this is going.
“Trying to push your father out of a position of power.”
“And does that run in tandem with our mission to be our own bosses? To do well with our own investment firm? To—”
“In a way,” I said, trying to keep my voice even-keeled.
I had not bargained for a fucking fight with my brother today, and I desperately wanted to avoid it becoming that.
“Right now, we have a ceiling on our heads in the form of Edwin Hunt. Whatever businesses we try to invest in, he’s going to make a better offer.
Whatever way he can to spread rumors about us, we can.
Edwin is both the ceiling preventing us from growing and the chainsaw underneath trying to cut us at the roots and the base. ”
“See, I just don’t see it like that,” Morgan said. “Before you say anything, let me speak.”
It took far more self-control than I cared to admit to bite my tongue and let him do so.
“The best thing we can do for MCH is to continue to grow our portfolio, invest aggressively, and use the knowledge that we have to build the business,” he said.
“These types of businesses, as you well know, tend to explode either into the billion-dollar status or into oblivion. If we go into oblivion, well, we’re right back where we started.
If we explode into the billion-dollar state, then we are in a position to have influence over Dad and prevent him from ever doing anything. ”
“Yes, but—”
“Ah, Chance, please.”
I nodded, actually said I was sorry, and allowed him to continue.
“This is the safest way for us to operate,” Morgan said.
“On a personal level, I get to keep my family intact. I get to go home for Christmas dinners. And my father and I can have some semblance of a relationship. On a professional level, we also get to keep family drama out of the business gossip. Do you really think if we take the approach you are that we’re never going to encounter any resistance?
You don’t think other friends of my father will hear what happened and blackball us as a result? ”
I…
I had thought about those things, but only in passing, only as things I had to dismiss as quickly as possible. I hadn’t given them the serious thought they deserved. I hated that Morgan was starting to poke holes in my plan.
He was making me realize that I hadn’t really pondered all of the consequences of my decisions.
I had simply kept an eye out for what would happen between the three of us, but never had I really sat down to consider what it would mean outside of us.
What it would mean for our reputations, for Rising Sun, for Virtual Realty, for the companies that Hunt Industries invested in…
I was just twenty two years old, but I was realizing that when you played games with billions of dollars, you affected millions of lives. It wasn’t just us three that would feel the repercussions of what happened.
“I hadn’t given it as much thought as I should have, to be honest,” I said, grimacing. “I just kind of assumed all would be well and then we could move forward. I didn’t think this all out.”
Morgan just sat silently.
“I don’t know, Morgan,” I said.
But even as I stewed, even as I realized how drastically I underestimated the impact of what we would do could have, I still came back to the idea of continuing this conquest over Edwin.
I could not have been the only person, and John Burnson could not have been the only businessman, hurt by Edwin.
Maybe our decisions would have ripple effects, but what if those ripple effects were actually an end-positive?
“I keep coming back to what I said earlier,” Morgan finally said.
“We should accumulate enough wealth through MCH that we can get a seat on the board at Hunt Industries. So much time will have passed by then that it’ll be easier for us to make amends with my father, lessen what he wants, and make us more successful.
The only part that sucks is there’s not as much instant gratification as here, and even then, it’s not like we’re going to wake up tomorrow and find Edwin is out as CEO. ”
Unless John Burnson can pull some triggers with this tape.
But he’s right. I don’t want to rush anything, and I can’t rush anything because nothing is able to be rushed.
“I just wish there was a way to make it happen,” I said with a sigh. “The man has been a bit of a thorn in my side.”
“I get it,” Morgan said.
But he didn’t get it. He never had. Why would things change now?
We eventually settled into silence, just watching sports and trading small talk about the highlights I saw on the screen, but it was here that I began to first fear that Morgan and I might have been drifting apart on our goals.
I couldn’t fault him too much, given that Edwin was his father and the stress he was under, but I did silently wish sometimes Morgan had more of a spine than he did.
Of course, in my selfish world, I would have wished for MCH to already be worth more than Hunt Industries, for Edwin to be out of his role as CEO, to have Morgan have a spine, to have Layla, Claire, and Sarah all in bed, and to have no emotional confusion or turmoil while this all happened.
But what I wanted and what I got rarely aligned. I didn’t know if that was par for the course for most people, but for someone used to getting fucked over in relationships, in business, and in life…
It sadly seemed all too common. And if I lost Morgan…
There was only one person who seemed to still have any interest not just in staying in my life, but progressing it forward.