I Got Fired Via Email While On My Honeymoon — Then 47 Clients Started Calling…
The subject line tried to sound neutral, like it wasn’t about to detonate six years of my life: Personnel update: position elimination. No “Dear Elena,” no voice, no warning—just a sterile header waiting inside an inbox I had no business opening. The Santorini sun blasted white off the caldera, bluer than any filter, the air sweet with figs and salt. Inside, Nathan slept with one foot kicked out from the sheets—new husband, ten days—and I stood on the balcony of a hotel I had saved three years to afford, letting my heart fall straight through the floor.
The email was fifty-eight words long. A body blow delivered in legalese.

Dear Ms. Christos,
Effective immediately, your position at Blackwood Partners has been eliminated due to departmental restructuring. Your final paycheck, including two weeks’ severance, will be deposited on the regular pay schedule. Please coordinate with IT regarding the return of company property upon your return.
Regards,
Josephine Blackwood, CEO.

No call. No conversation. Six years, sixty-hour weeks, canceled holidays, the Petropoulos account I’d landed after eighteen months of flying to New York and back on red-eyes, listening to a shipping tycoon talk about his grandchildren and what kind of legacy a man ought to leave—and I got Regards.

The bathroom tile was cold through my nightgown. I slid down the door and pressed a towel to my mouth to keep the sounds inside. When I finally came up for air, eyes swollen and throat burnt, Nathan knocked.

“Lena? You okay?”

I opened the door. He didn’t need to ask. I handed him the phone, watched comprehension move across his face and harden into something protective and angry.

“They can’t do this. On your honeymoon?” His voice was soft for me and flint for everyone else.

I shrugged. “Apparently, they can.”

He wrapped his arms around me like he was holding back the tide. “We are going to figure this out. But first, we’re turning off your phone and having breakfast. They don’t get to have our honeymoon.”

I did what he asked. We ate Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts on the balcony. We pointed out boats with ridiculous names. We pretended, for a few hours, that my career hadn’t been thrown into the Aegean.

At lunch, the pretending tore like a paper umbrella in a gust. While Nathan was in the bathroom, I powered my phone on. It erupted.

What is happening? Arjun, my assistant. Clients are freaking out. Josephine looks like she’s going to have a stroke. Call me.

The sisters are at each other’s throats. Daniela from legal. I’ve never seen anything like it.

They asked me to revoke your access—Rex in security—but I’m having… technical difficulties. You’ve got 48 hours before I have to comply.

Continued in the first c0mment 

Part One

The subject line tried to sound neutral, like it wasn’t about to detonate six years of my life: Personnel update: position elimination. No “Dear Elena,” no voice, no warning—just a sterile header waiting inside an inbox I had no business opening. The Santorini sun blasted white off the caldera, bluer than any filter, the air sweet with figs and salt. Inside, Nathan slept with one foot kicked out from the sheets—new husband, ten days—and I stood on the balcony of a hotel I had saved three years to afford, letting my heart fall straight through the floor.
The email was fifty-eight words long. A body blow delivered in legalese.

Dear Ms. Christos,
Effective immediately, your position at Blackwood Partners has been eliminated due to departmental restructuring. Your final paycheck, including two weeks’ severance, will be deposited on the regular pay schedule. Please coordinate with IT regarding the return of company property upon your return.
Regards,
Josephine Blackwood, CEO.

No call. No conversation. Six years, sixty-hour weeks, canceled holidays, the Petropoulos account I’d landed after eighteen months of flying to New York and back on red-eyes, listening to a shipping tycoon talk about his grandchildren and what kind of legacy a man ought to leave—and I got Regards.

The bathroom tile was cold through my nightgown. I slid down the door and pressed a towel to my mouth to keep the sounds inside. When I finally came up for air, eyes swollen and throat burnt, Nathan knocked.

“Lena? You okay?”

I opened the door. He didn’t need to ask. I handed him the phone, watched comprehension move across his face and harden into something protective and angry.

“They can’t do this. On your honeymoon?” His voice was soft for me and flint for everyone else.

I shrugged. “Apparently, they can.”

He wrapped his arms around me like he was holding back the tide. “We are going to figure this out. But first, we’re turning off your phone and having breakfast. They don’t get to have our honeymoon.”

I did what he asked. We ate Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts on the balcony. We pointed out boats with ridiculous names. We pretended, for a few hours, that my career hadn’t been thrown into the Aegean.

At lunch, the pretending tore like a paper umbrella in a gust. While Nathan was in the bathroom, I powered my phone on. It erupted.

What is happening? Arjun, my assistant. Clients are freaking out. Josephine looks like she’s going to have a stroke. Call me.

The sisters are at each other’s throats. Daniela from legal. I’ve never seen anything like it.

They asked me to revoke your access—Rex in security—but I’m having… technical difficulties. You’ve got 48 hours before I have to comply.

And then a text from Thomas in client services that made me slap a hand over my mouth.

Forty-seven of our biggest clients are threatening to leave unless we get you back. They said they only signed because of your personal involvement. Board called an emergency meeting. What do you want us to do?

Forty-seven. That was eighty percent of the high-net-worth portfolio I’d spent six years cultivating—not with Super Bowl tickets or golf trips, but with time and attention. I answered midnight texts. I mailed handwritten notes. I remembered that the Rosenbergs’ youngest hated buttercream and liked cream cheese frosting, so when their daughter made partner at her firm I sent a carrot cake—not out of a playbook, but because I knew.

My thumb hovered over the call button for Arjun. Instead, I scrolled. Voicemails from Mr. Petropoulos—a fellow Greek who’d chosen me because I could pronounce his grandmother’s name properly—growled, “Get me Elena or get me my money back.” Diana Chen, the tech CEO who’d followed me from my last firm, said, “Tell me what’s going on so I can decide whether to move immediately or by Friday.” The Rosenbergs used a single sentence I hadn’t known could feel like an embrace: “We trust you; we do not trust them.”

Nathan returned to the table to find me crying again—quiet this time, not broken. The tears were different. Acid had cooled to a slow burn.
“What now?” he asked, sliding into his chair.“I think,” I said, staring at the phone like it had turned from grenade to golden ticket, “Josephine just made the worst business decision of her career.”

To understand Blackwood Partners, you have to understand three sisters who inherited their father’s firm and tried to divide an empire into thirds.

Josephine, eldest, ran the math—brilliant, cold, a ledger in a dress. Marcela, middle, ran the room—relationship-builder, a heat that made even old money thaw. Regina, youngest, ran the machine—ops, HR, the thousand interior screws that never make the glossy brochure.

Marcela hired me six years ago at a competitor’s cocktail reception. I was thirty then, Greek-American, not tall, sharper than I let on. I’d hit a ceiling at my boutique firm—too female to push to front-of-house, too valuable to let go. Marcela decided I belonged somewhere that didn’t apologize for women who had both empathy and teeth.

Under her mentorship, I grew a book of clients that made other advisers ask the quiet question: How does she do that? There was no trick. I met Mr. Leowitz for coffee the week he quit drinking and we talked about black tea and how to survive early mornings sober. I sent Diana a signed first edition of Jane Eyre when her daughter didn’t get into her first-choice college—we talked about failing forward and how sometimes the smaller school is the place you actually bloom. I learned the Rosenbergs’ eldest hated public attention but loved to plan—so for her 40th I sent a donation to the literacy nonprofit she’d told me about on a flight to L.A. and a card that said, “I know you don’t want a party. I see you anyway.”

Then Marcela got sick, and the temperature in the building changed.

When pain enters a system, it looks for the path of least resistance. For Josephine, that meant cutting the things she couldn’t measure into certainty. The client appreciation gala shrank into a webinar with muted mics. The wellness stipends evaporated. The “soft” stuff—the space where Marcela’s art lived—was declared “inefficient.”

“We need standardization,” Josephine said at a spring strategy session, “not bespoke nonsense.” She glanced at me like the word itself offended her.

Three weeks before my wedding, she called me in.

“You’re spending too much time on individual attention,” she said. “We need to recalibrate your load.”

“I’m handling it,” I said, because I was.

“We’re moving Petropoulos to Bradley.”

I actually laughed. “He specifically asked for me. He told you that. He flew me to New York to say it to your face.”

“We cannot be vulnerable to clients’ personal attachments. Bradley will transition the account.”

Bradley was the kind of Harvard MBA Josephine liked to hold up like a mirror. His handshake was perfect; so were his blind spots.

“Josephine,” I said, and the middle child in me decided to use a first name like an axe, “you are confusing consistency with interchangeability. Standardization makes us reliable; relationships make us irreplaceable.”

She smiled the thin smile of someone who has never had anyone clap offbeat at their party and said, “That was Marcela’s philosophy. She has other concerns now. We need to be nimble.”

I was two weeks from walking down an aisle and didn’t have the fight in me. I filed resistance for later without asking what “later” would look like.
Hours after Josephine’s email arrived in Santorini, my phone lit with a text from Regina: Can you talk?Not yet, I wrote back. There was one person I needed to be: myself with a pen and a pad of paper.

Nathan and I poured wine and drew boxes. What did I want? Not vengeance—drop that word and it stands there begging to be fed until it eats you. I wanted leverage. I wanted my clients to know I saw them. I wanted Blackwood to feel it. And if I went back, I wanted it to be on terms that wouldn’t land me back in a seat with a place card that mocked me.

By sunrise I had drafts of letters to fifty-two families, each one nothing like a press release. “Sofia’s internship sounds exciting. Remember to ask about her mentor program. I know that mattered to you last year.” “Tom’s surgery is the 15th? I’ll check in on the 16th at 2:00 p.m. your time.” They weren’t mass emails. They were one-by-one threads with a person at each end.

Regina texted again: Board met. Offer voted two to one. Josephine opposed. Please come home.

Home. We use that word too easily for places that will never make you soup.

In Boston, I went to the tower on the harbor with my grandmother’s pearls in my ears and a suit I had bought to sit in rooms like the one they’d keep me out of unless I tore the door off. All three Blackwood sisters were there. Josephine with a PR handler beside her. Regina, anxious. Marcela, thinner, with a scarf tied carefully over cancer, eyes like she had learned to stare down death and found it less frightening than her oldest sister.

“I apologize for the email,” Josephine said. It sounded practiced, because it was. “The timing was unfortunate. We would like to bring you back at a fifteen percent increase, expanded equity, you would report to the board rather than—”

“No,” I said.

Silence is an instrument. If you use it right, you can hear money breathing.

“I’m starting my own firm,” I continued. “I have financing commitments contingent on client transitions. I’m offering Blackwood a twenty-five percent stake in my new company in exchange for an official spin-off partnership. You retain value; I retain my autonomy; clients maintain continuity with the person they actually trust.”

“You can’t ‘own’ clients built under our roof,” Josephine snapped.

“You can’t own people,” I said. “That’s literally the point. They choose. They’re choosing me. I’m offering you a way to turn your mistake into an asset instead of a crater.”

“Joe,” Marcela said softly, “she’s right.”

Regina was already doing the math out loud, God bless her. Board representation, revenue share ratios, regulatory filings. The PR handler had stopped scribbling and was just staring at me like I had walked out of a myth.

We signed three weeks later. Christos Partners got fifty-two families representing sixty-five percent of Blackwood’s high-net-worth assets. Blackwood got twenty-five percent of all our revenue for five years, then ten percent for five after that. They kept the lease with the view. We kept the people who looked out the windows and wanted to be able to call someone who knew their daughter’s middle name.

We opened an office three floors above a bakery whose owner called me koukla like my grandmother did. We hired Arjun and Daniela and Rex. We added a potted lemon tree because I missed Greek air. The plant died; the business didn’t.

On our first day in the space, a delivery guy wheeled in a ficus taller than the intern and said, “This is from the Rosenbergs,” with a card that read, “To the only person who ever called us on Saturday to remind us to rest.” I cried in the kitchenette and nobody made a joke about it.

I wish I could tell you that Josephine had an epiphany, wrote me a handwritten letter, and became a patron saint of fiduciary humility. What happened instead is that she resigned six months later under pressure, and their Christmas party had fewer shrimp. It was enough.

Part Two

You’d think the most satisfying moment would be the day we moved in. That it would be tangible—the ribbon, the plaque, the first invoice paid to a company with my name on the glass. Satisfaction, it turns out, is quieter than that. It came three months in, when Mr. Petropoulos called to tell me his grandson had gotten into Brown and asked if I thought Providence had decent Greek food. It came when Diana forwarded a note from a friend saying, “I’m switching because of how she handled my mother’s dementia with our family trust. She spoke like a human first and a consultant second.”

The work grew. So did the pressure. We codified what I had done by instinct. No emailing after 6 p.m. client time unless a deadline would cost a client money. No advice without context. No templated “personal” notes allowed—if you didn’t mean it, you didn’t say it. We built capacity plans that held our people as carefully as we held clients. A firm cannot ask its staff to care without also placing barriers around burnout.

Six months after we opened, the parent company—Blackwood’s parent, now ours—called. It was Kelton.

“We want your training,” he said. “The market has decided that your way is the way.”

I laughed. “It’s not my way; it’s the way you’d want your own parents treated.”

He didn’t laugh. He said the board had voted unanimously to adopt our verification protocols. They cut us a check that paid for a larger space and a wellness fund for staff and a scholarship in my father’s name for women going into finance who are also their family’s caregivers. We hung Dad’s photo by the door. He smiled at our clients like he approved.

During an ethics conference keynote, I told the story the way it made sense to tell it. Not as a list of crimes but as a culture that couldn’t imagine a woman could be both sharp and soft and therefore treated her like a prop until she made herself the plot.

In the Q&A, a young woman stood and said, “I work in a place that calls kindness a weakness. How did you know when to stop waiting to be valued and start building something that did?”

I told her the truth. “When being dismissed became boring.”

After the talk, Brida found me, hair shorter, shoulders wider. “We rebuilt the archive,” she said. “Every contract now has a living audit trail. Nobody can press delete on integrity again.”

“Good,” I said, and meant I am proud of you.

A year after that, we landed a client whose letterhead used to make my stomach knot: the competitor that hired Anise in Singapore. The man across the table didn’t know our history and didn’t need to. He wanted to understand our approach.

“We build to last,” I told him. “Which means we slow down to catch the thing that will cost you five years later. Which means we ask you how you’re sleeping and actually listen to the answer. Which means if your son is in rehab the month a signature is due, we read the clause that gives you space to be a father without penalties.”

It was a new language for him. He decided it was the one he wanted to speak.

Sometimes the past stepped across my path like a neighbor who lives one floor below you. Once, at a grocery store, Josephine brushed by me in the baking aisle. She looked smaller, the way people look when they are held responsible for something bigger than they are. She didn’t acknowledge me. She didn’t have to. It was enough to leave the store with flour on my hands and know that I had used it to make bread in my own kitchen, not brownies for someone else’s office party.

Marcela got better. We had lunch once a quarter. She never tried to lure me back again. She sent me a note that said, “Sometimes the house you build out of love gets taken over by someone who loves the house more than the people inside it. Thank you for building a home.” I kept the card.

Regina smashed a glass ceiling in a meeting and texted me to say it felt like breaking out of a museum. I wrote back, “Careful with bare feet,” and she sent me an emoji of a broom.

As for Devon, he petitioned to have his industry ban lifted early; the regulator denied it. He called once in the middle of a weekday. I let it go to voicemail. He said he hoped I was well. It was the first time in ten years that hope and me had been in the same sentence with his voice attached. I deleted it. I didn’t send him anything—not cruelty, not comfort. People tell you revenge is sending a message. What those people forget is that silence carries its own weight.
On the second anniversary of Christos Partners, we hosted our own dinner. The place cards were made by an intern whose calligraphy was worse than mine but whose heart was in the right place. They read Elena, Vernon, Diana, Rosenbergs, Brida, Kelton, Dad (we set one at the end and put his picture in front of it), Bakery’s Grandson, Nathan. We ate too much. We laughed. Someone toasted.“To the woman who made the most expensive mistake of Josephine Blackwood’s career look like it was written by fate,” someone said.

I raised my glass and corrected them.

“To the woman who turned being fired into a firm that treats people like people,” I said. “And to every person who thought they were disposable and turned out to be the reason their clients stayed in the first place.”

We clinked, and it sounded like a bell at the end of a school day you forgot you were counting the minutes to.

I’ve been asked what I whispered to the CEO that night at the team dinner. I told him the truth: that his signatures were telling on him. That his system thought speed was smarter than care. That this would cost him if he didn’t put people back in the center.

He believed me just enough to listen. Josephine believed herself just enough to ignore. Forty-seven clients believed me enough to call from their kitchens and cars and hospitals and ask where I was going so they could follow.

If you’re reading this because you got an email designed to make you small, I’m not going to tell you to be grateful for it. Pain doesn’t deserve thanks. But I will tell you the thing I wish someone had told me when I sat on a bathroom floor in Santorini with mascara on a hotel towel: you get to decide what your name stands for.

Mine stands on a door three floors above a bakery. It stands in a training manual used to teach people how to be human again in rooms where money talks so loudly it forgets to listen. It stands in the signatures of clients who know exactly who will pick up when they call.

They used to call me clueless spouse handler. Now they call me Elena. And that, in the end, was the only revenge that mattered.

END!