While this story draws on some real experiences, it is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person or institution is coincidental and unintentional.
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It was one of those moments when you think "yes, things have worked out pretty well." My wife, Carol, my daughter Gwendolyn, and I were standing outside our newly-built home on a barrier island on the Florida Gulf Coast. We were actually moving in to a small piece of paradise. We would learn what was on offer in that paradise, and a great deal about ourselves, in the coming months.
Carol and I had met in college. Despite being a second-string football player (scholarship you know), I managed to get a BS in electrical engineering and computer science. Carol got her degree in economics. We both stayed on. I got my Master's in EE while Carol got an MBA. I got a job with a small tech firm in the Midwest. Carol was from the East Coast and had a job offer from a big name New York investment bank. Instead, she took a job with a much smaller venture capital firm to stay in the same city with me. While most of Carol's decisions are patently sensible, I've never really understood her thinking behind that one.
Carol and I got married a year out of grad school. Not long after that, I started playing around in my spare time trying to devise solutions to some technical issues I was seeing at work. Due, probably, more to luck than skill, I found solutions. Carol's advice was not to simply turn my spare-time work, funded with our money, over to my employer but to monetize it myself. Thus, at age 26, Carol and I became entrepreneurs.
Due primarily to Carol's business and marketing skill, several companies started buying my products. Seemingly satisfied with those, I began getting requests to devise solutions to other problems and to devise ways to improve upon the technology my clients already had in place. While not 100% successful in fulfilling those requests, I did succeed on far more than I failed on. Again, due to Carol, more companies began buying my solutions and my support. We worked like dogs, but, in ten years we had a real company with enough revenue to support 50 highly qualified employees and we no longer worried about how to pay our bills.
Early on in our efforts to build our company, I added to Carol's burdens by getting her pregnant. Gwen was born when we were both in our late 20's. She sort of grew up with our company.
Carol is about 5'5" and, while not petite, is slender. Despite teasing me for being a dumb jock, Carol has always stayed in shape. Her figure is not imposing, but is perfectly proportional. Her face, framed by her brown hair, ranges from beautiful in repose to exquisite when she smiles. Gwen inherited her mother's face and proportional figure, but has it a bit more on my scale. Gwen is simply a bit bigger in the chest, shoulders, and hips than her mother. Both women are beautiful. Based only on seeing the two walk past, you would probably conclude that Gwen is sexier.
By the time Gwen had turned 18 and graduated from high school, both she and the company had grown up very well indeed. Gwen was a beautiful young woman. She had been a moderately successful diver and tennis player in high school and graduated second in her class. She had also been accepted to college at our alma mater, which had become much more selective since it gave me degrees. The company had grown to around 150 people split between an office in the Midwest and one in Silicon Valley. During Gwen's junior year in high school, a much larger, worldwide, tech company offered to buy us. The offer was way, way too good to refuse.
Carol and I found ourselves, in our late 40's, financially set for life with our child about to fly the nest. Carol decided that this was the time for us to relocate to a place where we could worry about a hurricane every decade or so instead of multiple blizzards per year. I wasn't really thrilled about leaving the Midwest, but Carol had left her part of the country for me so I figured that I owed her.
With Carol's usual very systematic approach to major decisions, we looked into a number of warm-weather areas domestically and elsewhere. For a number of reasons, we decided on the Florida Gulf Coast, not the least being that Tampa and Ft. Myers were both reasonable duration plane flights from where Gwen would be in college. We made several trips to the region before we found a reasonably-sized lot with an older, poorly maintained, house for sale on the Gulf side of a barrier island. The land was expensive and the old house would have to be replaced, but we could now afford it.
We wanted Gwen to finish high school where she was. Gwen graduated at the end of May. We took occupancy of the new house a week later. Gwen struggled with leaving her high school friends two months earlier than necessary, but the lure of beach and pool won out.
Our new house had neighbors on both sides. However, as seemed customary on the island, the lot had been landscaped so that you did not see the neighboring houses or the road. We added to the existing landscaping added some landward of the dunes to screen our pool and patio. The beach was public property. Having walked the beach several times before, we saw that our neighbors had done the same thing.
Carol and I had been down to see to finish items several times that spring. However, Gwen had been in school and had last seen the new house just as the framing was being completed. It was largely a surprise to her.
We parked our two cars in the ground level garage and carried our bags into the new house. The moving vans (yes, plural) were due later that day and the next. Carol and I were quietly pleased. Gwen walked from room to room making exclamations of approval.
Back in the central hall, Gwen asked, teasingly, "Why did you guys wait until I'm leaving for college to build this?"
"So you'd have some place warm to come on breaks," Carol replied.
Gwen stepped out onto the back patio and looked it and the pool over. "This is wonderful," she said. "I can't see another house. I can lay out here and work on my allover tan."
"Not so fast, young lady," Carol replied. I figured that my daughter talking about getting an allover tan was not a conversation which I should join.
The move went more smoothly than I expected. We spent the following week getting our things situated in the house "just right" and learning the important facts about our new neighborhood: where to get good wine and the best fresh fish. It was hard not to fall into "vacation mode" on the island so we were not working too hard.
Since we could not see the entrance to our driveway at the road from our new house, we had installed a sensor at the end of the drive. Anyone determined to get past it undetected could, but it set off a buzzer in the house if a car pulled in. That buzzer went off around 4:00 p.m. on our first Friday in the house.
The buzzer was a surprise since we did not know anyone on the island or the adjacent mainland. Carol and I both went to the front door to see who was coming in. We saw a new Mercedes convertible with the top down and two people inside. The car stopped. A man and woman got out and rang our doorbell.
I opened the door to an attractive couple who were, I guessed, a few years younger than us. The man was about Carol's height, with short dark hair and a deep tan. He had the thin and ultra fit look of a distance runner. His face created showed intelligence. The woman was about the same height as the man. She was blonde and also had a deep tan. She was also looked very fit but a bit more solidly built than her companion. Her face was more towards cute than beautiful.
As I opened the door, the man extended his hand. "Hello neighbor," he said. "I'm Ian Woods and this is my wife Kirsten. We live over there." The man gestured towards the house that I knew to be just north of ours but which I could not see.
"We knew, of course, that someone was building a new house here and we saw a moving van last weekend," Kirsten said. "We thought that we should come over and introduce ourselves."
"Thank you. Please come in," Carol said.
"I'm Harry Stone and this is my wife Carol. Our daughter Gwen is around here somewhere."
Ian's brow furrowed slightly. "Not the Harry and Carol Stone of...?" he asked, giving the name of our company (which I'm not allowed to use anymore).
"The same," I said smiling. "You have me a bit worried though if our reputation has preceded us."
"Oh no," Ian replied. "A big part of my business is cyber security. Some of my clients use some of your products." Gesturing at the house, Ian added, "I infer that the story that you cashed out in a big way was true."
