Chapter 9 - The Rebuilding
The winter gave way to a quiet, tentative spring.
The credit line was not recalled. The land purchase in Charlotte closed on schedule, but the man who sat at the executive table was no longer the same Jason who had entered it six months prior.
In April, Jason formally resigned his senior partnership at Prescott, Vance & Sterling.
He took a sixty percent pay cut to accept a position as a chief project coordinator for a mid-sized municipal housing non-profit in Greensboro—a job that required him to spend four days a week in high-visibility work boots, overseeing the construction of affordable family homes on local land.
He moved out of the three-story townhome in Myers Park.
He rented a modest, two-bedroom brick cottage six miles down the road from our house in Antioch. Every Saturday morning at seven o'clock, his silver pickup truck would pull up our gravel driveway. He would walk into the kitchen, kiss his mother on the cheek, pull on his work gloves, and spend five hours helping me repair the barn, chop firewood, or paint the porch railings.
Lauren’s divorce papers arrived in May.
She had demanded the townhome, the sports car, and a heavy monthly spousal support payment based on his former executive salary.
Jason didn't hire an expensive corporate defense firm to fight her. He hired a straight-shooting family attorney from Guilford County who presented the court with a clean, unvarnished accounting of Jason’s actual current income, his liquidation of secondary assets to pay off his marriage debts, and his full surrender of the Myers Park property.
When Lauren realized there was no large family fortune left to pillage—that the commercial bonds, the Elm Street warehouse, and the land holdings belonged entirely to Richard and Margaret Ellis and were protected by airtight family trusts—she accepted a quiet, standard settlement and moved back to her parents’ estate in Raleigh.
On a warm Saturday afternoon in late July, Jason was sitting on our back porch, sanding down a set of oak dining chairs he had bought at a local restoration yard.
Margaret stepped out onto the porch, holding a tray with two glasses of iced tea and a plate of fresh peach cobbler.
His hand stopped on the sandpaper. He looked at the peach cobbler, then up at his mother.
“Mom...” he said softly, a look of quiet, enduring remorse touching his eyes.
“Eat your cobbler, Jason,” Margaret smiled, setting the plate down on the wooden table beside his tools. “It’s fresh.”
May you like
He took a fork, took a small bite, and closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the porch railing. “It’s perfect, Mom. Exactly like it always was.”
“No,” Margaret said, leaning over to gently brush a speck of sawdust from his shoulder with her left hand—her right palm now bearing a thin, faded silver scar where the glass had cut her. “It’s better now.”
