My Wife Hid Me at Work, Now I Own Her Company novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Honest Favoritism

The twelfth-anniversary dinner was held in the same hotel ballroom where I had walked out on a birthday party.

Nobody mentioned it.

Three hundred employees sat at round tables, and the head table held the board, the investors and me.

The chief financial officer, still acting as chief executive, had given the opening toast.

He was now stuck on the second page of his speech.

Allison was not at the head table.

She sat at table nine, in the back, between two night-shift loaders, in a green dress she had bought with her first dock paycheck.

She had refused the seat I offered.

"I'm on probation," she had said that morning. "I'll sit where the staff sit."

Now I watched her over the candles.

She had her wedding band on her finger.

She was cutting her chicken and laughing at something the night loader said.

The investor on my left leaned over.

He was a silver-haired man in a very good suit, one of the three who had asked for Mr. Kemper's wife on the head table.

"Mr. Kemper," he said. "May I ask something frankly?"

"Go ahead."

"There is talk." He lowered his voice, but not by much. "Your late mother held a large stake. You've inherited it. And your wife, I'm told, ran the company until two weeks ago."

"That's right."

"So the company's largest shareholder is the husband of its founder, who has been demoted to the loading dock."

"Correct."

"Forgive me. How is that anything but favoritism in both directions?"

The table went quiet.

The woman across from us put down her fork.

I felt my heart pick up.

It was the question Allison had spent twelve years trying not to hear.

"It's a fair question," I said.

"I'm glad you think so."

"I'd like to answer it from the stage."

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