Funding the Unworthy

Before Vertex Corp. went public, a quiet investor secretly injected fifty million dollars, becoming the company's biggest backer for the sake of his wife, Chloe. At the celebration dinner, her father Robert turns on him in front of the whole family, calling him a freeloader and a parasite. Chloe, her sister Megan, and her mother Eleanor join in the mockery, and Robert announces he is casting him out of the Sterling family. When Chloe hesitates and suggests they are not a good fit, he agrees to a divorce.

Back home, Chloe offers him a kept position at the company and a fifty-thousand-dollar card for his three years of companionship. He refuses, telling her the family owes him two hundred million, the principal he invested. She thinks he is making an outrageous demand, unaware that without repayment he remains Vertex Corp.'s largest backer, and that any major decision will still require his consent.

All he wants now is to cut ties with them for good.