The last thing my father said to me before the stroke took his speech was that I should never trust a man who smiles before he shakes your hand.
I did not understand it at the time. I was twenty-six, standing in the doorway of his hospital room with a paper cup of coffee going cold in my hand, and he was propped up against the pillows looking smaller than I had ever seen him, and he gripped my wrist with a strength that surprised me and said those words, slow and deliberate, and I thought it was the medication talking. It was three days later that the second stroke came, the one that took his words entirely, and I never got to ask him what he meant, and it was almost a year after that, standing in a conference room watching my uncle smile at me before extending his hand, that I finally understood he had been trying to warn me about his own brother.
My name is Ivy Calloway, and this is the story of how my uncle tried to steal the company my father built, and how I stopped him, and what it cost, and what it did not cost, which turned out in the end to be the more important accounting.
My father was a man named Errol Calloway, and he built a company called Calloway Precision out of a rented garage and a single secondhand machine when he was younger than I am now. It made specialized components, the kind of unglamorous, essential parts that go inside larger machines that go inside still larger machines, the parts nobody thinks about until they fail. It was not a famous company. It would never be a famous company. But it was a good one, a real one, and by the time I was grown it employed a hundred and forty people and it had a reputation in its particular corner of the industry for doing things right, for holding tolerances other shops could not hold, for standing behind its work.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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