“I want to talk,” Rhonda said. “Tomorrow.”

She was ready, she said, to blow the whistle on Arrival.

They could not be seen together. She’d rent a room at the Hilton, have a key card left for him at the desk. Kyle went to the hotel at the appointed time, but there was no key for him. No Rhonda Templeton had checked in. So Kyle waited in the lobby for two hours until he received a call from the office asking if he’d heard the news.

Rhonda was dead.

Hell of a thing. That morning, the superintendent of her condo broke into her unit when water started flowing out from under the door. Found her naked body in the bathroom. Looked like she’d gotten into the tub while the water was still running, slipped, and hit her head on the edge. A fatal blow. What were the odds?

What were the odds, indeed.

Kyle knew how he must have sounded in the interviews he gave after that. Arrival had not only used one of his own employees to sabotage him, but murdered her when her conscience got the better of her. Gandalf’s reputation already in tatters, now Kyle personally was seen to be in a delusional free fall. Gandalf stock plummeted. The company went bankrupt, the factory mothballed. All but a handful of employees remained, most devoted to winding down operations. Even Emeril got the boot.

Kyle lost his Cape Hatteras seaside mansion, the Soho condo in New York. His stable of rare sports cars, including his 1961 Jaguar E-Type, a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, and his most treasured find, a 1983 DeLorean, the vehicle from those Back to the Future movies, was auctioned off.

And worst of all, he lost Beverly.

Five years. Good times. But Beverly wasn’t interested in sticking around for the bad. “I can’t take it,” she’d finally told him. “This obsession, this drive to get even, it’s consumed you. Every minute of every day, it’s Lisa this, Lisa that. You’ve got a choice to make. You can either move past what’s happened, let me help you move forward, or you let this anger and revenge completely eat you up, and do it alone.”

Kyle made his choice.

Thank God there was a prenup. Managed to send her packing with a cool million. Chump change compared to what she might have gotten without one. So there was still money left to do what he had to do.

To get even.

Arrival and its CEO, Lisa Carver, had humiliated him.

Destroyed all that he had worked so long to build. His life’s dream.

Kyle had become a joke on late-night talk shows. What was it one of the hosts quipped? “I was going to buy a Gandalf, but decided not to take the plunge.”