Over a period of 5 weeks, Celeste opened the folder and read in a voice so quiet that everyone had to lean slightly toward it the four policy provisions that had been violated the acknowledgement. Elliot had electronically signed at hire and the section of the employee handbook governing unauthorized data access. She noted that the conduct might also constitute a breach of fiduciary duty. She used the phrase for cause twice. Elliot looked at Marin.
He was not proud of it afterward, but for two or three seconds he genuinely expected her to speak. He had brought her the credential record. He had sat in a diner with her four nights a week. He had turned down $460,000 a year 8 days ago, and he had done it. He understood now, at least partly for her.
Marin uncrossed her arms. Elliot Vance is terminated effective today, she said. Security will escort him out. I want his equipment inventoried before he leaves the floor. The room absorbed it.
Conrad's eyebrows moved perhaps 2 mm. A flicker of surprise at being handed something he had planned to fight for. Celeste closed her folder. Elliot said nothing at all. He looked at Marin for a moment and she looked back at him with nothing in her face whatsoever.
And then he turned and walked out between the two security men and 40 minutes later he was standing on Wacker Drive in the wind with a cardboard box containing a coffee mug, a photograph of Tess at the aquarium and a dead badge. He picked his daughter up from after school care at 5 and made spaghetti and helped her label the moons of Jupiter. and he did not let one thing show on his face because he had made a decision when she was six and he intended to keep. It. At 9:30 after she was asleep, he sat down at the kitchen table with the human resources envelope he had been handed at the door and opened it because he needed to know how bad the severance situation was. He read the first page, then he read it again.
The separation was documented as termination without cause. Elliot sat very still. Termination without cause meant no finding of misconduct. It meant nine months of severance, full continuation of medical coverage, accelerated vesting of his existing equity, and no adverse notation of any kind in his employment record. It meant the confidentiality and cooperation provisions that attached to a disciplinary exit did not apply to him.