Chapter 3
Michael's face went from white to a deep, blotchy red. He pointed at me, and his finger shook.
"Charlotte, have you lost your mind? You're really handing the patents to NovaTech?
"Do you have any idea what that means?"
I looked at him evenly. "Of course I know what it means.
"It means the good times are over for the both of you."
Rachel looked no better, though she held herself together far better than Michael did.
She forced a smile and turned to Edward.
"Mr. Lane, think this through. Charlotte still has an open employment dispute with Pioneer Solutions.
"Legally, those patents may not be entirely hers. Sign with her now and you could be buying yourself a lawsuit."
It was a bare threat, and a hint that I came with trouble attached.
Edward smiled. "You're worrying over nothing, Ms. Winters. NovaTech has the best legal team in the business.
"We run every risk assessment there is before we sign anything. I trust Ms. Quinn's judgment, and I trust my lawyers'."
His position could not have been clearer. He was covering me.
Rachel's smile locked in place.
Every bit of fight went out of Michael, and what came out of him was barely a mutter.
"Why? Charlotte, why are you doing this to me? We're married."
I watched him fall apart and felt nothing but the irony of it.
"When you sat on the phone with your mother while she called me a curse, were we married then?
"When you sat on the phone with your mother while she called me a curse, were we married then?
"Michael, drop the act. If you're not tired of it, I'm tired of it for you."
The words went in like blades and opened up the last of his cover.a
What was left of his color went with it.
Edward picked his moment. "Mr. Reed. Ms. Winters. If there's nothing else, I'd like you both to go.
"Ms. Quinn and I still have terms to work through."
It was a dismissal, and everyone in the room heard it as one.
Rachel's nails dug so far into her palms it looked like they'd break skin.
She gave me one long look, full of anger, of refusal to accept it, and something closer to poison underneath.
Then she turned and left.
Michael trailed out after her, hollowed out, like a dog whose owner had walked off without him.
The door closed behind them and the room was finally quiet.
Edward sat back down and poured me a cup of coffee.
"Sorry you had to sit through that, Ms. Quinn," he said.
I shook my head. "I'm the one who should apologize.
"I brought my marriage into a business meeting."
He waved it off. "It's nothing.
"If anything it makes me surer I chose right. Anyone who can knock a competitor that far off balance is no ordinary person."
I smiled and let it go.
We got down to the real business, and NovaTech's terms were generous.
They took the patents as equity and handed me five percent of NovaTech's founding stock on top of it.
They promised me top-level access and a standalone team for the Genesis project.
I picked the people. I spent what I needed to spend.
There was one target only. We had to ship a product that beat Polaris, and ship it fast.
Edward's ambition ran as big as his nerve.
He didn't want to pull ahead. He wanted the whole market.
And I was the sharpest blade he could find to take it with.
We talked into the evening and settled every detail.
Edward's assistant brought in the drafted contract.
I read it through. The terms were clean and nothing was buried in them.
I wrote Charlotte Quinn at the bottom of the last page.
From that day on I was not Pioneer Solutions' head of R&D, and I was not Michael's wife.
I was a partner at NovaTech Group and the head of the Genesis project.
People said my name differently now, and it carried weight.
After I said goodbye to Edward I drove back to the apartment.
A familiar shape was waiting downstairs, and it was Michael's mother.
She had planted herself across the entrance like a bouncer.
The moment I got out of the car she came at me.
"You shameless woman. So you did come back," she yelled.
She went straight for my hair. I'd been expecting it and stepped aside.
Her hand closed on nothing and she stumbled, nearly going down.
"You dodge me?" she screamed, past all control.
"Let me tell you something, Charlotte. As long as I'm breathing, you will not divorce Michael.
"And you will not walk off with the Reed family's money and hand it to strangers."
The Reed family's money, she called it. I almost laughed in her face.
"Mom, get this straight. That company, that house. Which one of them didn't I earn?
"What did Michael ever put in besides showing up?
"Your whole family eats on my money and lives in my house, and then turns around and shows me the door.
"What exactly is your skin made of?"
She had no answer for any of it, and her face went red holding it in.
"You. You're twisting everything," she sputtered.
"I don't care. You're coming back with me. You're coming to the office and signing that contract."
She reached for my arm again.
I took a step back and pulled out my phone. I dialed 911.
"Hello, police? I'm at Fairview Court on Maple Street. A woman is harassing me and making physical threats.
"Yes. Please send someone as soon as you can."
I put it on speaker so the dispatcher's voice carried.
Michael's mother stopped dead and stared at me like she couldn't process it.
"You called the police on me? I'm Michael's mother."
I looked at her without warming up at all.
"The day the lot of you threw me out with the trash, you stopped being anything to me.
"That word means nothing here."
A patrol car pulled up a few minutes later and two young officers got out.
They asked what was going on.
Michael's mother was still putting on her show.
She told them I was an ungrateful wife who'd let greed rot her judgment.
The officers had clearly handled a hundred family scenes like this one.
They gave her a formal warning and told her that what I'd done counted as self-defense.
What she'd done counted as harassment.
One more incident and she'd be answering questions down at the station.
That took the air out of her.
She looked at me with pure resentment and didn't come one step closer.
Once the officers left she pointed at me and threw out one last line.
"You wait, Charlotte. You'll regret this."
Then she slunk off.
I watched her go, and nothing in me stirred at all.
Regret was a strange word coming from her.
The one thing I regretted in my whole life was marrying Michael.
I had fed my best years and everything I could do to a family of ingrates.
All I was doing now was correcting a mistake, one that had run eight years long.
Back at the apartment I opened my laptop and signed into my personal email. A dozen unread messages were waiting, all from people in R&D at Pioneer Solutions, asking why I'd quit so suddenly and whether something was wrong.
Seeing those familiar names go by warmed something in me.
They were my people, trained from nothing, most of them recruited by me straight off a campus.
We'd pulled all-nighters together and broken through walls together. That builds something close to what soldiers have.
I thought about it and answered none of them.
It wasn't time yet.
I opened another encrypted folder. Inside was the technical framework I'd built for Genesis long before any of this.
Yes, I had seen this day coming from a long way off.
The closer Michael and Rachel got to each other, the harder I worked on a way out for myself.
The Polaris System was powerful, and it had one fatal flaw.
Nobody on earth knew about that flaw except me.
Genesis was built from the ground up to close it.
It would be new, and it would break the industry wide open.
I looked at the code on the screen and felt my eyes sharpen.
Michael and Rachel were going to feel this one.
Their nightmare had started.