Losing Everything

Chapter 10.8

It had been almost a full day since the last board meeting, when Lucy had been told she was being removed from the board, and forced out of Bitmo. It had been almost that long since media releases would have started going out saying Bitmo was in receivership, and slightly less time since Lucy’s meeting with her accountant in which she had been told she was going to be chased personally for Bitmo’s debts, and that effectively she was bankrupt.

It was a lot to happen in a day, and it had all happened fairly quickly, but she still had a feeling that the people she wanted to talk to would already have heard.

She sat for a moment, thinking.

She needed to fix this. Erica was right. She needed to do something, rather than just give up and wait for people to sue her. She felt bad for herself, and what she’d lost, but being around Erica was reminding her that there were other people being hurt, too. She was beginning to feel awful about the staff. Many of them were fairly new hires, people she hadn’t had much to do with and hadn’t really known, but even so, this was still a horrible mess for them. Worse, some, a few, had been with her as long as Erica had, since back when Bitmo had been meant to do something important and change the world and make them all rich. Those people deserved better than what had happened.

Lucy had let them down. They had trusted her, and she had failed them. She had failed them by trusting Jake, which had been entirely her mistake. She ought to have known better, and that meant everything else was partly or entirely her fault.

She felt awful, and the more she thought, the worse she felt. She had to fix this, even though she still quite shocked by the suddenness of it all.

She made herself start. She couldn’t help the staff without helping herself, so she started making calls. She tried to get Bitmo financing, or at least a bargain-basement buyout offer, to protect the staff’s jobs. She phoned the most obvious people she could think of, people she’d known and worked with for years, but something odd was already happening. Everyone she called was unavailable, on their way urgent appointments, or in meetings, or about to start lunch. She tried a few more people, and got the same kind of responses.

Apparently she didn’t have friends any more.

Secretly, she had thought as much, that half her contacts would abandon her as Bitmo sunk, and the other half would be picking Jake and want nothing to do with her, but it still hurt to have that confirmed.

It was a shame, too. She had thought she had a network of contacts. For a while she been successful, and had something to offer, and she had always made a point of helping people, of reaching out, of being supportive of others even when there wasn’t an immediately obvious benefit for her. She had always done that, because it seemed like the right thing to do, but now she actually needed help herself, and was trying to call in favours, she got nowhere.

She got absolutely nowhere, and that hurt as well as making her feel hopeless.