Camille did too.
They sat on the floor beside Marcus’s desk like two exhausted children.
For nearly ten minutes neither spoke.
Then Naomi looked toward the watch.
“Dad would hate this.”
“What?”
“All the crying in his office.”
Camille smiled through tears.
“No.”
“He would pretend to hate it.”
“Then he’d bring tissues and complain we were getting saltwater on the wood.”
Naomi wiped her face.
“Do you want to keep everything?”
Camille looked around.
“No.”
“What do you want to keep?”
“Your father.”
Naomi closed her eyes.
Camille touched her hand.
“Unfortunately, that is the one option nobody offered.”
They laughed again.
It took nine months before they began sorting.
Some papers went to the family.
Some to corporate archives.
Some to the university that held Marcus’s business records.
Some were shredded.
Marcus had left explicit instructions.
Do not preserve every grocery list because I became old and people decided I was important.
Naomi found the note taped to a drawer containing grocery lists.
Her father had anticipated them.
Camille read it twice.
“Burn the groceries.”
They did.
There was no secret fortune.
No undisclosed ownership stake.
No hidden confession.
Marcus had been too well-lawyered for surprises of that kind.
But inside the bottom drawer of the desk was a black folder labeled:
SYSTEMS THAT GOT BETTER AND THEN GOT LAZY AGAIN
Naomi stared at it.
Camille laughed.
“That is your father.”
Inside were reports spanning twenty-five years.
Retail audits.
Complaint statistics.
Mystery-shop data.
Security procedures.
Algorithmic sales experiments.
Customer-segmentation proposals.
Margin analyses.
And handwritten notes.
The earliest concerned the reforms after the Beverly Hills incident.
The later ones were more skeptical.
One margin note read:
THE FIRST GENERATION REMEMBERS THE FAILURE. THE SECOND REMEMBERS THE POLICY. THE THIRD REMEMBERS ONLY THE INCONVENIENCE.
Another:
EVERY SUCCESSFUL SAFEGUARD EVENTUALLY ACQUIRES EMPLOYEES WHO THINK IT IS POINTLESS BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER SEEN THE DISASTER IT PREVENTS.
Naomi sat back.
“That’s cheerful.”
Camille pointed at another line.
IF A RULE HAS WORKED FOR TWENTY YEARS, SOMEONE WILL EVENTUALLY PROPOSE REMOVING IT BECAUSE NOTHING BAD HAS HAPPENED FOR TWENTY YEARS.
Naomi laughed.
Then stopped.
A report beneath it was only three years old.
Title:
A&V NEXT CLIENT — PREDICTIVE RELATIONSHIP OPTIMIZATION
Naomi frowned.
“What is this?”
Camille shrugged.
“I stopped pretending to understand corporate language before you were born.”
Naomi opened it.
Arden & Vale no longer belonged to the Bennett family.
Marcus had sold most of his controlling interest decades earlier, though a family trust retained a small institutional stake and one advisory board seat.
The luxury group had grown internationally.
Stores in thirty-one cities.
Private-client salons.
Online appointments.
Virtual fittings.
Invitation-only collector events.
The old “Visual Purchasing Signals” program had been eliminated long ago.
No associate was supposed to look at clothing and guess purchasing power.
Instead the company had adopted data.
That sounded better.
The report described an artificial-intelligence system that could predict the probability that a customer would purchase within ninety days.
The score used:
Past transactions.
Website behavior.
Appointment history.