They fired him for misconduct, dishonesty, retaliation, and interference with the investigation.

The promotion he had staked everything on evaporated.

His unvested shares — the fortune that was supposed to arrive the day the merger closed — were canceled under the same morality clause he had never imagined would apply to him.

The merger itself went forward, but without him, and the company, once the scandal was public, did a thing I had not expected and have not forgotten: it established a restitution fund for household employees who had been exploited under its umbrella, and it asked my organization to help administer it.

The system that had protected men like Dalton for so long had, for once, turned and worked the other way.

I do not want to make the company sound noble; it acted, as institutions always do, out of self-interest, calculating that a visible act of contrition was cheaper than the reputational cost of appearing to have sheltered him.