Chapter 2: The Napkin
Ruth Kim’s office was on the eleventh floor of a building downtown, and at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, it was dark except for her desk lamp.
She’d let me in herself, in sweatpants and a mustard-yellow blazer she must have grabbed off the back of a chair. Her gray hair stuck up in every direction.
“Sit,” she said. “I’ll make tea. You look like you need something warm that isn’t vodka.”
We’d been roommates at Ohio State. She was the one who’d told me, in 1997, that I was the smartest person in our finance seminar and an idiot about men. Both were still true.
While the kettle heated, I looked at the framed print on her wall. Abstract. Brown and green. A little bird, if you squinted.
“You still have it,” I said.
“You gave it to me when we set up the company. Of course I still have it.”
Here is what nobody at the gala knew.
In 2004, my grandmother died and left me her farm in Lancaster County. Two hundred acres of corn and soybeans. A developer bought it eight months later for nine million dollars.
I was twenty-six. Marcus and I had been married four years. He was managing a supermarket and dreaming about owning one, and he had a rule he repeated often enough that I believed it was part of his spine.
I’ll never take a dime from your family, Di. Whatever I build, I build myself.
His father had married money and been reminded of it every day for thirty years. Marcus would rather fail than become that man.
So I didn’t offer. I didn’t tell him the farm had sold for that much. I told him it had gone for “enough to pay off the student loans,” and I let him think that was all.
Then I called Ruth.
We set up Wren Holdings LLC in Delaware. Ruth was the registered agent. The investor of record was a trust. When Marcus opened his first Bright Harbor store in 2006 and ran out of money in eleven months, a polite letter arrived from a lawyer named Ruth Kim, offering a two-million-dollar investment from a private client who “admired the concept.”
Marcus came home that night and spun me around the kitchen. Somebody believes in me, Di. Somebody actually believes in me.
Somebody did.
Over the next eighteen years, Wren Holdings invested eleven million dollars in Bright Harbor Foods. When the banks said no in 2009, Wren’s personal guarantee made them say yes. When the company needed new locations, Wren bought the buildings and leased them back at fair rent. Twenty-two of the thirty-eight stores sit on property I own.
My late father had been a banker in Columbus. His old friends made calls when I asked them to. Marcus thought he had a gift for walking into rooms and getting loans.
He did have a gift. I’d only opened the doors.
Ruth set a mug in front of me. Chamomile, with too much honey, the way I’d taken it in college.
“Thirty-four percent,” she said, sitting down across from me. “That’s what Wren owns. Plus the leases. Plus the guarantee on the credit line. Diane, without you, Bright Harbor is a nice idea with a lot of debt.”
“I know.”
“Does he?”
“He thinks Mr. Wren is a reclusive old man in Florida who sends a Christmas card.” I wrapped my hands around the mug. “Ruth, I didn’t call you to burn down his company. There are four thousand employees. There’s Owen’s tuition. There’s…”
“There’s something you need to see first.” Her voice changed. Lawyer voice. She opened a folder. “I was going to call you Monday. Marcus contacted me two weeks ago. He wants to buy out Wren’s shares. All of them.”
“With what money?”
“He has a lender lined up. He told me Mr. Wren is old and should cash out while he can.” She slid a page toward me. “The price he offered is about a third of what the shares are worth.”
My husband was trying to buy my own company back from me for pennies, and he didn’t even know it was mine.
“Who’s the lender?”
Ruth didn’t answer right away. She turned another page, and her finger stopped on a line near the bottom.
“I ran a background check on everyone involved in the deal,” she said. “Including his new brand officer.”
“Tessa.”
“Tessa Vaughn spent six years at Halvern Partners. They buy struggling companies and strip them for parts.” Ruth looked up at me over her black-framed glasses. “And they’ve been trying to buy Bright Harbor for two years.”
