The termination letter was dated the same day as her funeral. March 14th. A Wednesday.
I’d worked at Shenandoah Property Group for six years. Never missed a day. Never called in. But when my mother’s liver finally gave out after eleven months of chemo, I took three days off without “proper advance notice.” That’s what the letter said. Proper advance notice. Like I should’ve penciled in her death.
Greg Hatch, regional VP, handed me the envelope himself. Caught me in the parking garage Monday morning, still wearing the same black tie from the burial. I hadn’t even made it to my desk.
“Company policy,” he said. Didn’t look at me. Looked at his phone. “We’ve already reassigned your accounts.”
Six years. I closed more leases than anyone on the floor in 2022. Trained four of the people who still worked there. And Greg couldn’t even put his phone down.
I didn’t argue. Didn’t raise my voice. My hands were shaking but not from anger. From exhaustion. Three days of no sleep, planning a funeral alone because my dad’s been gone since ’09 and my brother lives in Anchorage.
I took the letter. Walked back to my car. Sat there for forty minutes.
Here’s what Greg didn’t know. What nobody in that office knew, because I never talked about my family. My mother’s older brother is Daryl Pruitt. Daryl built Shenandoah Property Group from nothing in 1994. Sold it to a holding company in 2018 but retained a 34% stake and a permanent seat on the board.
I never used his name. Never wanted to. Mom asked me not to, years ago, said I should make my own way. And I did. Six years, ground up.
But three weeks after Greg fired me, my uncle called. He’d just gotten back from Portugal. Said he tried reaching my mom’s phone.
I told him everything.
There was this silence on the line. Eight, nine seconds. Then Daryl said one sentence. Quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn’t need volume.
“I’ll be in the office Thursday.”
Thursday came. I wasn’t there, obviously. But my old coworker Pam texted me at 9:47 AM. Then again at 9:51. Then she just called.
“There’s a man in Greg’s office,” she whispered. “Greg is white as a sheet. The door’s been closed for twenty minutes and – “
The door opened.
What Pam Saw
She said Greg walked out first. Didn’t go to his desk. Walked straight to the elevator bank with a cardboard file box under his arm. Didn’t say a word to anyone. Didn’t make eye contact. His face had this look she described as “post-car-accident.” Like someone who’s still alive but hasn’t figured out how to feel about it yet.
Then Daryl came out. She didn’t know who he was. Nobody on that floor did, except maybe the office manager, Janet, who’d been there since 2016. Janet stood up from her desk like she’d seen a ghost. Because she had, sort of. Daryl’s portrait used to hang in the lobby before the rebrand in 2020.
Pam said Daryl walked to the center of the floor. Sixty-four years old, gray hair cropped short, wearing a navy sport coat and no tie. He didn’t introduce himself. Just stood there until people looked up from their monitors.
“I’m Daryl Pruitt,” he said. “Some of you might not know that name. But I built this company. And I’m still on the board. I’m here because someone in leadership decided that firing a man on the day of his mother’s funeral was acceptable practice.”
Nobody moved.
“It’s not.”
Then he walked out. Took the elevator. Gone.
The whole thing lasted maybe two minutes on the floor. But Pam said it felt like an hour. She said three people cried. Not from sadness. She didn’t know from what. Maybe relief. Maybe shame. Maybe the weird electricity that comes when someone actually says the thing everyone was already thinking.
The Week After
I got a call from the holding company’s HR director the following Monday. Woman named Carolyn Demko. Very professional, very measured. She asked if I’d be open to a conversation about “recent events surrounding my departure.”
I said sure.
She offered my job back. Same title, same salary, plus the three weeks of pay I’d missed. She also offered a formal written apology from the company, which I hadn’t asked for and didn’t particularly want. But she kept insisting it was “important for their records.”
I told her I needed to think about it.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you about moments like this. Everyone imagines the revenge part. The satisfaction. Greg’s face. The dramatic speech. Justice raining down. And yeah, when Pam called me that Thursday morning, part of me felt good. I won’t pretend I didn’t. Part of me wanted to run a victory lap.
But mostly I just sat on my couch in the apartment and felt tired. My mom was still dead. The funeral had still happened alone. My brother still hadn’t flown down. And three weeks of unemployment had already cost me a late payment on my car loan.
The revenge didn’t fix any of that.
What I Found Out About Greg
Pam filled me in over the next few days. Turns out Greg wasn’t just fired. He was put on what the company called “administrative separation pending internal review,” which in normal English means: you’re done but we need to investigate whether to sue you too.
Because here’s the thing. My termination wasn’t just cruel. It was illegal. Virginia is an at-will employment state, yes. But the company’s own internal bereavement policy, which Greg had signed off on during his onboarding in 2019, guaranteed three days of paid leave for immediate family deaths. No advance notice required.
Greg knew this. He must have. His signature was on the policy document.
So why did he do it?
Pam had a theory. She’d been there almost as long as me. She said Greg started acting different about eight months before my firing. More paranoid. More petty. Tracking bathroom breaks. Questioning PTO requests with a hostility that felt personal. She thought he was under pressure from above. Maybe his numbers were bad. Maybe he was trying to prove he was “tough.”
Or maybe he was just a guy with a little bit of power who’d forgotten what it cost other people.
I don’t know. I never asked him. Never spoke to him again.
My Uncle
Daryl called me the Sunday after his Thursday visit. He didn’t gloat. Didn’t even bring up Greg’s name. He asked me if I’d eaten. I said yeah. He said “real food or gas station food” and I laughed for the first time in a month.
He drove down from his place in Loudoun County that afternoon. Brought two bags of groceries and a rotisserie chicken. We sat at my kitchen table and he talked about my mom.
He told me things I didn’t know. That she’d lent him $4,000 in 1993, the year before he started the company. That she’d typed his first business plan on a Brother typewriter in her apartment while eight months pregnant with me. That the company’s original name was going to be Pruitt & Pruitt, both of them, but she’d said no. Said she wanted to teach.
She became a high school English teacher. Twenty-six years at the same school.
“She never wanted credit,” Daryl said. He was eating chicken with his fingers, grease on his knuckles. “But she wanted you to have credit. For your own work. That’s why she made me promise not to interfere.”
He looked at me across the table. His eyes, same green as hers.
“She’d be pissed at me right now,” he said.
I said I knew.
He said, “I don’t care.”
The Decision
I took the job back. Not because I forgave the company. Not because of loyalty or closure or any of that. I took it back because I was broke and my lease was up in May and I’d already burned through my savings during Mom’s treatment.
That’s the honest answer. No poetry in it.
I went back on April 11th. A Tuesday. Parked in the same garage. Walked past the same spot where Greg had handed me the envelope. Took the elevator up. Sat at my old desk, which someone had cleaned out and then restocked with fresh office supplies like nothing had happened.
Pam brought me a coffee. Didn’t say anything about the whole situation. Just set it down and squeezed my shoulder. That was enough.
The new regional VP was a woman named Terri Sloan. Transferred in from the Richmond office. She introduced herself, shook my hand, and said “I’m sorry about your mother.” No corporate script. No policy language. Just five words.
I said thank you.
Six Months Later
I’ll tell you what changed and what didn’t.
The company updated their bereavement policy. Added language about immediate family, extended family, even “chosen family” which I think was Carolyn Demko’s idea. Fine. Good.
Greg Hatch landed at a smaller firm in Fredericksburg. I know because his LinkedIn updated in June. He didn’t list a reason for leaving Shenandoah. Just “seeking new opportunities.” I didn’t feel anything when I saw it. Not satisfaction. Not anger. A mild twinge, maybe, like pressing on a bruise that’s mostly healed.
My brother finally came down in July. Four months late. We scattered some of Mom’s ashes at the Shenandoah River, which felt right even though she’d never been a nature person. She just liked the name. Said it sounded like a song.
Daryl and I have dinner every other Sunday now. He’s teaching me about the board stuff. Not because I want a seat. Just because he wants me to understand what she helped build, even if nobody ever put her name on it.
And some mornings I still sit in my car in that garage for a few minutes before going up. Not forty minutes anymore. Just two, three. Enough to breathe. Enough to remember that I’m there on my own terms. That Greg is gone and I’m not. That my mom wanted me to earn it.
I earned it.
Some people really don’t think before they act — like the woman who didn’t even try to hide the camera, or the teacher who laughed and told a mom her bullied son should “try being normal”. And then there’s the woman at a school talent show who told a little girl to “go back where she came from” without checking who was sitting behind her — that one hits hard.
