He Kept Me on a $1,800 Allowance and Called Me a Kept Housewife. He Never Checked Who Held the Deciding Vote on the Company He Was Trying to Buy

A careful acquirer performs due diligence on every party to a deal, follows every share to its holder, reads every trust to its final page.

Barrett had done all of that diligence on Whitman Tech Solutions, for eighteen months, in exhaustive detail.

But he had never done it on me, because to run diligence on me would have required him to entertain, for even a moment, the possibility that I mattered to the outcome — and that possibility had been unthinkable to him for so long that the machinery of his caution simply skipped over the space where I stood.

He checked every lock on the house and never noticed that his own wife held a key to the front door, because in his mind I was not a person who could hold a key.