I went to my desk and pulled out a folder. I set it on the coffee table in front of him.
“These are emails between your mother and Margaret. Going back eight months. Your mother’s own lawyers sent them to mine by mistake.”
He stared at the folder like it might bite him.
“Want to know what she wrote about me?” I said. “She called me ‘a necessary inconvenience that needs to be managed out before the IPO.’ And in one of them, she says it’s ‘time for Daniel to think about his future and more suitable partnerships.'”
Daniel’s face went pale.
“And this one,” I said, sliding a page toward him. “Where she explains how they’re going to put other engineers’ names on my improvements and bury me in legal fees until I give up.”
He read it. I watched his hands start to shake.
“I didn’t know about this,” he whispered. “Liv, I swear to God, I didn’t know about the patents.”
“Did you know about the rest?”
He couldn’t look at me.
“I knew she wasn’t happy about us. About how it would look to investors, having my wife running R&D. Conflicts of interest, she said. But I never thought she’d actually…”
“Never thought she’d do it? Or never thought I’d fight back?”
The silence that followed was heavy with everything neither of us had said for three years.
Finally, Daniel looked up. His eyes were tired and sad.
“What do you want, Liv? Just tell me. Name your price. Whatever it takes to make this go away.”
I laughed. There was nothing funny in it.
“Make it go away. You still don’t get it. This isn’t about money, Daniel. It never was. This is about respect. It’s about recognition for something I built with my own two hands. What’s the price on that?”
“Mother will never give you your job back. You know that.”
“I don’t want my job back,” I said. I stood up. “I don’t want anything from Bennett Technologies. What I want is for your mother to finally understand exactly what she threw away.”
My phone buzzed on the desk. A text from Marcus.
Thompson Medical just called. Ruth Thompson wants to meet you. Personally. Tomorrow.
Thompson Medical. Bennett’s biggest competitor. A family-owned medical device company out of Nashville that had been trying to break into wearable cardiac monitoring for five years. And failing, because nobody else had a sensor like mine.
I looked at Daniel.
“You should go,” I said, walking to the door. “I have a meeting to prepare for.”
He stood up slowly. He looked lost inside his perfect suit.
“Liv. Please. Don’t destroy everything we built.”
“I’m not destroying anything,” I said softly. “I’m building something new. Something that’s mine.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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