I still run Avery Logistics out of the same business park, 41 trucks and now 69 people. Viven is still chief executive of Sterling Atlas Group. And the Mid-Atlantic Network was never sold, and its margin profile recovered exactly as fast as you would expect once, several million dollars a quarter, stopped walking out the back. The commercial relationship between our two companies was assigned to an independent third-party administrator with no reporting line to either of us, which was Meredith's idea, and which means my rates are now set by a woman in Charlotte who has never met either of us and does. Not care what we are to each other.
Meredith Langford serves as interim chair of the board. Conrad Whitmore is under federal investigation on matters relating to wire fraud and securities disclosure and whatever happens in court. His 40 years of relationships in that room ended in a single morning in January and are not coming back. I do not feel triumphant about it. I have thought about him more than I expected to.
And what I keep landing on is that he lost because he could not imagine a man who wanted less. and he could not imagine a woman who would choose the truth when a lie was sitting right there fully drafted in her hand. Laya came around slowly, which I insisted on, and Viven never once pushed against. It was not the money because a 9-year-old does not understand tens of billions of dollars. And it was not the gifts because after the first attempt, I explained the situation and there were no more gifts. It was that Vivien said she would be there Thursday and was there Thursday.
It was that she learned the difference between a hot spot and a subduction zone and did not pretend to have known it already. Somewhere in the spring, my daughter stopped saying Viven and started saying we, as in we're going to the aquarium, and I did not say anything about it, and neither did Vivien, but I saw her face. Last week, she came back from a 14-hour day, three flights, and a hostile call with a sovereign fund, and let herself in through my kitchen door with her shoes already in her hand. No boardroom, no aircraft on a tarmac, no billions of dollars, just a small warm house with the oven on and a bad couch nobody intends to replace.
I was making dinner. She sat down at the table, looked at the plain platinum band on her finger and said, "You know, technically I'm one for three." I told her she finally made the right offer. She asked what changed. I looked at her and said, "The offer didn't." Then I said, "You