Travis turned back to his chairman, and the warmth drained out of his face again. "Howard." Lassiter straightened. He knew what was coming, and he'd known it from the moment he opened his mouth.
"Yes." "You're a good man who did a coward's thing," Travis said. "I've known you 14 years, and I'd have trusted you with my life right up until an hour ago."
"The worst part is, you didn't do it for money. You did it because you were scared of how a soft quarter would make you look." He shook his head slowly. "You're sitting on my board telling other people how to run honest businesses, and you waived my own ethics policy to juice a number."
"I can't, Howard. I can't unsee that." "I know," Lassiter said. "I'm not going to fight it."
"I came here to confess because I couldn't live with it anymore. Whatever you decide, I'll—" "Here's what I decide," Travis said. "You resign from the board tonight, effective immediately."
He paused. "And then tomorrow you go to work as a regular employee, no title, no committee, on the team that unwinds every bad loan Meridian wrote. Every one. You're going to spend the next year personally calling every Whitmore we trapped and telling them you're forgiving their debt."
"You're going to look each one of them in the eye, and you're going to know exactly what you did. Not as punishment." Travis's voice dropped. "As penance."
"Because you're a good man, Howard, and a good man doesn't need to be destroyed. He needs to be put back in front of the people he hurt until he remembers who he was supposed to be." Lassiter's eyes filled. "That's... Travis, that's more than fair."
"That's more than I—" "It's the same thing the man in 1983 did for me," Travis said. "He didn't destroy the loan shark. He just made me pay attention to what mercy costs, so I'd spend it carefully for the rest of my life."
He almost smiled. "I'm not going to throw away 14 good years over one bad month. But you're going to earn your way back every single day." The courtyard had gone from a place of spectacle to something almost like a church.
Sixty wealthy people who'd come for champagne stood in total silence, watching a man in cracked boots dispense a kind of justice. None of them had ever seen justice that punished without destroying, that forgave without excusing, that somehow held everyone, including himself, to the exact same impossible standard. Then Travis turned finally to the two people who'd started it all. Ethan, wrecked and weeping and saved.
Vanessa, who hadn't said a word in a long time, was watching her husband cry with an expression of dawning hope and terror. "You two," Travis said, "you get your company back and a real investment, and a second chance most people never get. But understand me."
His voice went flat and serious. "I'm going to be watching. Two board seats. I'll know how you treat the 11 you bring back."
"I'll know how you treat the receptionist and the janitor and the man who pumps gas into your sensible new car. Because the deal I just gave you isn't really about the money." He stepped closer. "It's a test."
"I'm betting on the idea that a man can change. That the right kind of mercy at the right moment can turn somebody around. People bet on me once when I didn't deserve it." He held Ethan's eyes.