Chapter 4
Because there was truth inside it.
After the accident, I had stopped entering the laboratory.
At first because doctors told me to.
Later because the smell of overheated plastic made my hands tremble.
I moved into operations instead.
Then compliance.
Then product safety.
Eventually Jason began presenting the inventions as if they had always belonged to him.
I told myself ownership didn't matter because we were married.
Because we were partners.
Because someday we would fix the paperwork.
Someday became ten years.
“I stopped designing,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I didn't stop owning what I'd already designed.”
Jason's face changed.
For one second, I saw the young man who used to sit beside my hospital bed with spreadsheets scattered across his knees, promising that our little idea would survive.
Then the expression disappeared.
Judge Warren called a recess.
The room burst into movement.
Reporters hurried toward the hallway.
Leonard pulled Jason toward a conference room.
Madison followed several steps behind them.
Daniel handed me my coat.
“You did well.”
“I don't feel like I did.”
“That may be a sign you did.”
I looked at him.
Daniel was sixty-one, silver-haired, and so calm that even elevators seemed quieter when he entered them. He had been my mother's attorney years earlier after a minor property dispute, and when I called him about the divorce, he had listened to me for nearly two hours without once interrupting.
Then he had asked the question no other attorney had thought to ask.
What did the company make before it became valuable?
That question had changed everything.
I slipped my coat around my shoulders but didn't button it.
“My marriage is becoming a patent case.”
“No,” Daniel said. “Your marriage is ending. The patent question was always there. You're simply no longer ignoring it.”
Across the hallway, I saw Madison standing alone near a window.
Jason and Leonard had gone into the conference room without her.
For the first time, she looked less like the triumphant woman who had entered the courthouse on his arm and more like someone who had accidentally walked into a story without knowing the first chapter.
She noticed me looking.
Then, unexpectedly, she approached.
Daniel shifted slightly closer to me.
Madison stopped several feet away.
“I didn't know.”
I waited.
She twisted a gold bracelet around her wrist.
“About the invention.”
I said nothing.
“Jason told me you never worked at the company.”