Page 53 of The Founder's Power

Isabelleand I spend the next few weeks in a kind of quiet neither of us expected. The noise fades. The suits stop calling. The empire’s no longer mine, and oddly, neither is the weight that came with it.

Isabelle doesn’t ask for grand gestures. She just asks for presence.

Showing up has never been easier, and I doubt I’ve ever been happier.

Dinner. Morning walks. Gallery nights and studio hours and the kind of conversations that have nothing to do with leverage and everything to do with life.

I help install shelves at her new downtown space. I frame one of her paintings. She laughs when I hang it crooked. It’s our space now. Ours to build. Ours to fill.

Vincent wins the boardroom war, but he won’t be done. He’ll always need more. Always chase the next deal. He’s a man who only feels alive when someone else loses.

But me? I’ve never felt more alive than I do waking up next to her.

No press release. No applause.

Just sunlight and skin and silence.

Just love.

It turns out, I was never the empire.

She was.

And I’ll spend the rest of my life protecting it—with everything I have left.

At the pinnacle of it all, I was untouchable.

I had the power. The influence. The cold, clean control that made lesser men flinch when I entered a room. I was ruthless, respected, and feared.

And utterly alone.

I didn’t know that then, but I know it now.

Rebuilding with Isabelle isn’t about clawing my way back to the top. It’s about redefining what the top even means.

* * *

The first projectwe take on together is hers mostly—an interdisciplinary arts initiative with city partners and tech-backed funding models. I help structure the backend by building sustainable revenue flows, pulling in the right investors, and guiding the strategic rollouts.

But it’s her vision, her fire, and I don’t try to control it.

I elevate it.

We work from her gallery some days in between meetings, from the sunlit loft tucked above the studio. There’s no mahogany desk. No leather chairs or soundproof glass. Just open windows, mismatched mugs, and floorboards that creak when you shift your weight.

The light up here is golden in the mornings, slanting across worn brick and canvas drop cloths like it’s blessing every inch of the space. Half-finished paintings lean against the walls. Notes are taped to the edges of tables—color theory reminders, exhibition deadlines, ideas scribbled in her looping hand.

It smells like linseed oil, coffee, and faint lavender.

It smells like her.

She sits barefoot at the worktable across from me, her laptop open, a paintbrush still tucked behind one ear. Her toes curl around the rung of her chair when she’s focused, and I’ve started to measure time by how long it takes her to notice she’s still wearing one of my shirts over her sundress.

Sometimes, she talks while she works about artist grants, or nonprofit partnerships, or the gallery’s expansion project. Other times, we sit in companionable silence, both lost in different kinds of creation.

This space shouldn’t feel like home. It’s cluttered. It’s chaotic. There are no sharp edges or controlled variables. But I’ve never felt more grounded.

Here, I don’t need a skyline view or a boardroom battle to prove I still matter.

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