Insurance requirements.
Maintenance responsibility.
Ordinary commercial rules.
The marital residence was appraised.
We eventually agreed on a division that did not require either of us to turn the house into another battlefield.
I did not chase every dollar I could have argued over.
Laura did not contest property she had no serious basis to claim as hers.
Michael thought I conceded too much in two places.
Vanessa probably thought Laura did in others.
That usually means the number is somewhere near livable.
I refused one thing consistently.
I would not guarantee the expansion.
There would be no second showroom financed by assuming Gregory Hayes would eventually put his signature beneath it.
Laura tried twice to revisit that issue.
Not through manipulation.
Through fear.
The signed lease created problems.
Furniture deposits were at risk.
People had accepted job offers.
I sympathized.
I did not sign.
That was one of the hardest lessons of the entire process.
Empathy did not require rescue.
Laura spent years believing those were the same thing.
So had I.
The expansion collapsed.
Not Laurel Row itself.
The original company was profitable.
Good, even.
But the second showroom had been built on leverage Laura could not safely carry alone.
She negotiated out of the Design District lease by accepting a loss.
The imported furniture order was resold through another dealer at a discount.
Two designers who had given notice elsewhere had not yet started. Laura called both personally and apologized.
Pam later told me those conversations devastated her.
Not because of money.
Because Laura finally understood what it felt like when somebody else's plans depended on your word.
Daniel disappeared from the picture almost immediately.
By April, he had moved to Scottsdale.
The story going around was that Dallas had become “too constrained” for the kind of opportunities he wanted.
Pam heard it from a vendor.
I laughed when she told me.
Then felt bad for laughing.
Not for Daniel.