Chapter 9 - The New Empire
Six months later, the June sun was bathing downtown Denver in golden light, glinting off the glass facade of our new corporate headquarters on the seventeenth floor of the Meridian Tower.
Stellar Events was no longer a boutique operation run from a laptop. We now occupied an entire floor, employing eighty-five specialists across logistics, design, hospitality, and corporate strategy. My office was a sunlit corner suite with panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains—mountains that looked smaller now that I had conquered them.
My phone rang, displaying Marcus’s name.
"Lily, the quarterly review with Victoria Caldwell’s executive board is starting in ten minutes," Marcus said, his voice brimming with professional excitement. "They’re proposing an expansion of our contract into their European resort portfolio for next year."
"I'm on my way down," I said, smoothing the lapels of my tailored white blazer.
As I walked down the glass-paneled hallway, passing teams of energetic, talented professionals who looked at me with genuine respect and admiration, I caught my reflection in the polished glass. There was no trace of the quiet girl standing in the utility kitchen waiting for orders. There was only a founder, a CEO, a woman who had built her empire from the ground up through sheer grit and undeniable excellence.
Of course, my family hadn't vanished completely from the periphery of my life.
Through mutual acquaintances in the Denver business community, I heard occasional echoes of what had happened to the Septtons. The merger with the Pacific Group had fallen through after Meridian Holdings pulled its consulting capital from my father’s legal firm. My father had been forced into an early, unceremonious retirement, his reputation tarnished by the viral embarrassment of Christmas Eve. Sarah had dropped out of the corporate track, her social circle evaporating the moment her family’s status began to slip.
Margaret had sent me three letters over the spring—handwritten, pleading, filled with apologies and justifications about how hard they had worked to give me a stable life.
May you like
I hadn't opened a single one of them. I had returned them all to sender, unopened, with my corporate return address stamped neatly in the corner: Lily Septton, CEO, Stellar Events.
Let them read my name on the envelope. It was the only access they were ever going to get.
