Chapter 4: The Rift That Almost Destroyed Their New Bond
For the first six months after the court ruling, everything seemed perfect. Jax and Kael worked side by side every day, implementing Eleanor’s vision, lowering rents, building new affordable housing, expanding the community programs across the country. The Hale company’s profits went up, even with the rent freeze, because tenants were able to pay their rent on time, because the community centers and grocery stores were drawing in new customers, because people across the country wanted to support a company that was actually using its wealth to help people. Jax moved into the penthouse at Hale Tower, the first time he’d ever had a permanent home, and he and Kael became like brothers, spending their nights working in the penthouse’s library, ordering takeout from their favorite Bronx pizza place, talking about their plans for the future. Kael started dating a teacher who worked at the after-school program in the Bronx, a woman named Maya who’d grown up in a low-income family, who helped him understand the needs of the community even better. Jax started college, enrolling in NYU’s business program, taking classes at night so he could work during the day, finally getting the education he’d never been able to have when he was homeless. But as the months went by, a rift started to grow between the two cousins. It started with a proposal from a national real estate developer, who offered to buy 10 of the Hale’s underperforming properties in Detroit, for $500 million, a price that was twice what the properties were worth. Kael wanted to take the deal. The $500 million would give them the capital they needed to build 10 new affordable housing buildings in Chicago, which would house 5,000 low-income families, way more people than the 1,200 families who lived in the Detroit properties. The developer had promised to renovate the Detroit properties, to keep the rents affordable for the next 10 years, to add community centers and grocery stores to the buildings. But Jax refused to take the deal. He’d visited the Detroit properties a month prior, he’d talked to the tenants who’d lived there for 30 years, who’d raised their kids there, who’d built their lives in those buildings. They’d told him that the developer had a history of buying properties, renovating them, and then raising the rents after 10 years, evicting all of the original tenants, turning the buildings into luxury condos. Jax had done his research, he’d found dozens of cases where the developer had done exactly that, and he refused to sell the properties, to put 1,200 families at risk of being evicted. The fight over the Detroit properties was the first big argument Jax and Kael had ever had. They screamed at each other in the penthouse’s boardroom for three hours, Kael saying that they could help more people by taking the deal, Jax saying that they couldn’t betray the tenants who’d been loyal to the Hale company for decades, that Eleanor would never have sold those properties, that she would have never put a cent above the needs of the people who lived in her buildings. The argument ended with Jax storming out of the penthouse, moving back into the Bronx community center, refusing to talk to Kael for two weeks. The rift grew bigger after that, every decision they made turned into a fight, Kael wanting to make deals that would generate more capital to build more housing, Jax refusing to put any current tenants at risk, convinced that Kael was falling back into his old greedy habits, that he was starting to care more about numbers than people. Kael, in turn, thought that Jax was being too stubborn, that he was refusing to see the big picture, that he was so focused on protecting the current tenants that he was ignoring the millions of people who needed housing across the country. The fight got so bad that their legal team started to worry, that the rift between the two co-CEOs would split the company, that they would end up in court fighting over the estate, just like the board members had. Margaret Carter, Eleanor’s old lawyer, called them both to a meeting, and she told them that Eleanor had predicted this would happen. She’d left a letter, to be opened only if Jax and Kael started fighting, that explained what she wanted them to do. Margaret gave them the letter, and they went to the Bronx laundromat, the place where they’d first started to understand each other, to read it together. The letter was written in Eleanor’s neat, looping handwriting, dated a week before she died. She wrote that she knew the two of them would fight, that Kael would always be tempted by numbers and profits, that Jax would always be tempted by stubbornness and distrust of people who’d grown up with wealth. She wrote that they needed each other, that Kael’s business sense and Jax’s connection to the community were the only things that could make her legacy work, that neither of them could run the company alone. She wrote that she’d sold a property in Detroit in 1985, that she’d made the same mistake Kael was thinking of making, that the developer had evicted all of the tenants, that she’d spent 20 years trying to make it right, building new housing in Detroit to give those families a new place to live. She told them that if they ever had a fight about a decision, they should go back to the place that started it all, that they should talk to the tenants, that they should remember why she’d built the empire in the first place: to take care of people, not just to build more buildings. Jax and Kael sat on the folding tables in the laundromat, reading the letter, crying, just like they’d cried when Eleanor died. They talked about the fight, about their fears, Kael admitting that he was scared he would never be good enough to honor Eleanor’s legacy, that he was trying so hard to make up for his past mistakes that he was making new ones. Jax admitted that he was scared that Kael would go back to his old ways, that he would lose the only family he’d ever had, that he was so focused on protecting the community that he was pushing away the only person who could help him build it. They decided to fly to Detroit together, to talk to the tenants of the properties, to come up with a solution together.
