I looked at Greg and said, “You’re right. Investors do deserve the full picture.”
He still had that relaxed little smile at first. The one he’d been using for months whenever he talked about me like I was already halfway out the door.
Then I pulled a folder out of my bag and slid copies across the table.
Not accusations. Not rumors.
Invoices.
Wire transfers.
Contracts signed through a second LLC none of us at the company recognized.
One investor actually took his glasses off to reread the header.
Greg’s expression changed fast after that.
I stayed calm. “While you were telling everybody I’d lost my edge, I was trying to figure out why clients were being billed through a company none of us approved.”
Nobody interrupted me anymore.
I explained how three long-term accounts had quietly been redirected through Greg’s side business over the last year. Small enough individually not to trigger attention right away. Big enough together to become a serious problem.
Greg tried laughing it off at first. Said it was consulting work. Standard restructuring.
Then one investor asked the question that really broke the room.
“Why wasn’t the board informed?”
Greg started talking fast after that.
Too fast.
Talking about temporary arrangements and tax efficiency and verbal understandings that suddenly sounded a lot less convincing out loud than they probably had in his head.
I just sat there letting him dig.
Because the entire time he’d been trying to make me look unstable, he’d apparently assumed nobody would look too closely at him either.
One investor finally asked me how long I’d known.
“About six weeks,” I said.
The silence after that was brutal.
Greg looked around the table waiting for somebody to back him up, but nobody did. One guy was already flipping through the invoices again like he was calculating exposure in real time.
And honestly the part that finished Greg wasn’t even the side deals.
It was one investor quietly saying, “So this leadership conversation was supposed to happen before or after we found out?”