PART 3
He called back at 4 p.m.
His voice had changed.
“It expires in ten days.”
“Eleven.
You lost a day.”
“Nadia, I didn’t — nobody told me it was a license.
I thought — the IP came in with the merger, the company owns — ”
“The company has never owned it, Dominic.
The company has rented it.
From me.
For nine years.
Your father-in-law told me to do that at a kitchen table and you were in the room.”
Silence.
“I was in the room.”
“You were on your phone.”
“Who’s been managing the renewal?”
“You tell me.
Who reads your contracts?”
And there was a pause so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Trent.”
“Yes.”
“Trent renewed it five years ago.
He came back from a meeting with you and said you’d been — he said you’d been difficult, that you wanted more, that you’d — ”
“I signed the renewal in eleven minutes, Dominic.
On the same terms.
I asked for nothing.
He told me you’d sent your regards, and I told him to tell you I hoped you were well, and I went home and threw up, because I was seven weeks pregnant and hadn’t told anyone.”
“He said — ”
“I know what he said.
I’ve had five years to work out what he said.
The question is who he said it to.”
The pressure started on Wednesday, and it came from the direction I’d expected.
Not Dominic.
Trent.
He called the lab — Corwin Materials had a lab now, nine people, in a converted machine shop on Delmar — and asked for “a quick word about the renewal.”
“There’s no renewal, Trent.”
“Nadia.
Come on.
Five years.
Whatever happened between you and Dom — that’s personal.
This is a supply chain.
Eleven thousand people work on that membrane.”
“I know how many people work on it.
I know their names.
I hired the first forty.”
“Then you know you can’t just — ”
“I’m not doing anything, Trent.
The term ends.
The term was always going to end.
You’ve known the date for five years; you initialed it.”
“Nadia — ”
“Trent, who is ‘M’?”
Silence.
“I don’t know what — ”
“Fourteen messages.
Three weeks.
A number saved in my phone under a letter that I did not save.
You had my phone for two days that spring — you took it to have the company security profile installed.
You gave it back on a Thursday.
The first message was dated the Friday.”
“That’s — you’re reaching, that’s — ”
“I’m not reaching.
I’ve had the carrier records for four years.
I just never had a reason to show them to anyone, because the only person they’d have mattered to had already decided.”
I hung up.
Then I called Dominic’s mother.
That surprised her.
Celeste Ashcroft had not spoken to me in five years, and had, at the settlement, told her attorney within my hearing that “some women are simply not built for this family.”
“Nadia.”
“Celeste.
I’m going to ask you one question and then I’m going to hang up, and I’d like you to think about it for a week.”
“I don’t — ”
“Did Trent tell you about the messages before he told Dominic?”
The silence went on for a long time.
“Why would he — ”
“Because you’d been telling Dominic for two years that I was ‘holding the company hostage’ with the patent.
Because you sat in on the licensing meeting in year three and asked my attorney, in front of me, whether ‘a wife should really be invoicing her husband.’
Because Trent needed someone to say ‘I’ve had my suspicions’ when Dominic came to them with the phone.
And you did.
Didn’t you?”
Celeste Ashcroft breathed.
“He’s my son.”
“Yes.
And in ten days, his company loses the thing it runs on, and the only person who could have stopped that was the woman you called ‘not built for this family’ — who has been raising his three sons eleven miles from your house for four years without asking either of you for a dime.”
I hung up.
My sister, at the lab door, said, “You didn’t tell her about the boys.”
“I did.”
“You told her there were three of them.
You didn’t tell her their names.”
“She hasn’t earned their names, Pri.”
Thursday, Vivienne came.
The woman in red.
I want to say something about that, because in these stories the other woman is usually a joke, and she wasn’t.
She was thirty-four, an architect, and she’d been seeing Dominic for a year, and she came to the lab on Delmar in a sensible coat and stood in the doorway and said, “I’m not here to fight with you.
I’m here because he hasn’t slept in three days, and he told me about the boys, and I’d like to know from you whether any of this is real.”
“All of it.”
“The messages — ”
“Were sent by his COO from a number he set up with my phone in his hand.
I have the carrier records.
I’ll show you if you want.”
She sat down.
I showed her.
When she was done, she said, “He’s going to leave me.”
“I don’t know that.”
“I do.
I watched him look at those children.
I’ve been with him a year and he’s never once looked at me like that.”
She stood.
“I’m not going to be angry at three four-year-olds, Nadia.
That’s the most I can promise.
But I’d like you to know I’m going to be angry at Trent Mallory for a very long time.”
“Get in line.”
Friday, Dominic came.
Not to the lab.
To the house.
He stood on the porch of a three-bedroom on Alder Court that I’d bought with license fees he’d never known were mine, and he did not ring the bell, because Rhys had already seen him through the window and opened the door.
“You’re the man with Kit’s hair.”
“…Yes.”
“Are you a friend of Mom’s?”
Dominic looked at me, in the hall, with a dish towel.
“I’m working on it,” he said.
