He let out a slow breath. "And the whole time my own company was doing to 62 strangers exactly what he did to me. Except we did it with a contract instead of a sneer." "Travis—" Lassiter started.
"Don't." Travis held up a hand. "Just give me a second." He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he did something nobody expected. He turned to Ethan Whitmore, the man he'd spent half an hour dismantling, and he said in a completely different voice, "The bridge loan. The terms. Did anyone explain to you what a confession of judgment actually was when you signed it?"
Ethan blinked, thrown by the change. "I... no, not really. They said it was standard. My company was 12 days from missing payroll."
"I'd been turned down by four banks. Meridian was the only one who'd move fast." He swallowed. "I signed 40 pages in an afternoon."
"I didn't have a lawyer look at it. I couldn't afford the delay. They knew that. I think... I think that was the point."
"That was exactly the point," Travis said quietly. "That's how those loans work. You find a man who's drowning, and you sell him an anchor, and you call it a life preserver." He looked at Ethan with something that had shifted.
Not warmth, but a grim recognition. "I'm not absolving you. You're still a man who humiliated a stranger for sport, and that's still on you. But the trap that's killing your company, that wasn't you being a bad businessman."
"That was my company being a bad lender. And I didn't know it until 30 seconds ago." The crowd was hanging on every word. The story had turned inside out.
The villain who'd been getting his comeuppance was now partly a victim of the very man dispensing the justice. "Howard," Travis said, turning back to his chairman, "you approved it. You hid it. You let me ride into this blind."
"For 14 years I have trusted you with everything." His voice didn't rise, but it sharpened to a point. "Why?"
"You've got more money than you'll ever spend. You don't need a profitable bridge loan. So why did you waive my policy and bury it?" Lassiter's composure finally broke.
"Because I wanted the quarter to look good," he said, and the shame in it was total. "We were soft in Q2. Meridian's numbers were going to drag the whole report. I knew if I waited for you to fly back from Singapore, you'd kill the deal on principle."
"We'd miss the target, and the board would... I'd look like I couldn't run the place without you holding my hand." He laughed a horrible, broken sound. "I did the exact thing you just spent half an hour describing."