On the morning the Palisades burned, Michele Havens went to work and never returned home.
She was weeks into one of the biggest professional transitions of her career — leaving a 24-year tenure at Northern Trust to lead BMO’s U.S. wealth management business — when the January fires swept through her Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Her children were pulled from school. The family checked into a downtown hotel. That evening, tracking the destruction on their phones like the rest of Los Angeles, they learned their house was gone.
What remained, aside from her family, was a gold bracelet her grandmother had given her — worn by chance that Tuesday morning.
“You probably don’t need to spend too much time valuing physical possessions when you have the gift of your family with you,” Havens says.
It is the kind of statement that sounds like a rehearsed platitude until you learn more about the woman saying it. Havens, who now serves as head of U.S. we
