Chapter 7 - PALISADE WAS A PROBLEM—JUST NOT THE ONE I EXPECTED
The outside review of Palisade Workforce Solutions took six weeks.
I expected fraud.
That is difficult to admit.
Part of me wanted the invoices to reveal something enormous enough to justify every instinct I had.
Reality was less dramatic.
Palisade supplied real workers.
Hours were generally supported.
Facilities received services.
The rates were high but not wildly outside emergency-market ranges.
No evidence showed Aaron or Celeste secretly receiving kickbacks.
That mattered.
I had been right about one thing.
The relationship should have been disclosed.
Celeste's nephew-in-law owned forty percent of Palisade.
Aaron knew.
Celeste knew.
The board did not.
The administrative-fee increase also had not received the review company policy required for related-party contracts.
Governance failure.
Conflict.
Poor oversight.
Not the massive theft I had started imagining.
I felt almost disappointed.
Then ashamed of that disappointment.
I did not need Aaron to be guilty of everything for his treatment of me to matter.
The review found another issue.
Aaron had approved Palisade's amended pricing after receiving a side commitment from the vendor.
Not money.
Priority staffing during severe shortages.
Weller Care Group had been desperate that winter.
Two communities nearly failed minimum staffing expectations.
Aaron made a business decision.
A risky one.
Possibly defensible.
The problem was he concealed the family relationship because he knew directors might delay approval.
Again.
Consent later.
Disclosure later.
Solve emergency first.
Explain after.
The pattern crossed from marriage into business.
Then Celeste defended him.
“He saved the company during a staffing crisis.”
One director answered:
“Then he should've disclosed the conflict and asked us to approve it.”
“There wasn't time.”
“There was enough time to sign an amendment.”
That sentence could have described my marriage too.
Aaron always found time to act.
Never time to ask.
Still, none of this explained why he needed to make me look unstable.
The vendor issue could have produced reprimands.
Maybe policy changes.
Why risk so much more?
Rebecca said:
“Because Palisade may not be the thing he's afraid of.”
She was right.
A deeper review of board communications revealed Aaron had done something before the vendor questions ever surfaced.
Two months earlier, he had submitted an annual management certification to the company's lender.
It included a section confirming that material related-party transactions had been disclosed according to policy.
Aaron signed it.
Celeste signed as chair.
Then, three weeks later, I discovered Palisade's ownership link.
If the board concluded it was material and undisclosed, Aaron had a credibility problem with the lender.
Not automatically catastrophic.
Correctable, perhaps.
But embarrassing.
Professionally serious.
And he had already signed his name.
Then came another complication.
Aaron told the lender's relationship manager that the Palisade issue arose from:
A recent internal dispute regarding COO Claire Weller's aggressive reinterpretation of vendor policy.
He had started framing the problem as my interpretation before the board even reviewed it.
The story was getting bigger.
Then Lauren found an attachment to Aaron's wellness memo.
A draft incident summary.
It contained blank spaces.
Date:
DINNER DATE.
Witnesses:
TBD.
Event:
Claire becomes verbally aggressive after family attempts to discuss workplace stress.
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The incident had been summarized before it occurred.
That was no longer ordinary defensiveness.
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