He Hid Me Twelve Years and Paraded Her, So I Quit Both novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: A Pencil and a Pad

"Why call me first?" I asked.

"Because Mr. Stroud used the word 'owns' about a person," the chief executive said. "I have run an oat company for thirty-one years. I know how people sound when they talk about owning the thing that makes their product work."

I held the phone with both hands.

"What do you want from me?"

"Eight o'clock tomorrow, my office in Elk Grove. Bring a pencil and nothing with the Stroud logo on it."

"Why a pencil?"

"I like to see what a person does when she can't type."

He hung up.

Jonah had pulled his jeans back on while I talked, and he was watching me from the arm of the couch.

"Harlan?" he said.

"Harlan."

"Do I get to be happy for you, or is it too soon?"

"You get to drive me," I said.

Harlan Foods sat in a brown brick building beside its own plant, and the parking lot smelled like toasted oats.

The chief executive was a bald man in his seventies, in a short-sleeved shirt, eating dry cereal out of a paper cup.

He gave me a yellow legal pad and a pencil with a chewed end.

"Write what our customers want from us," he said. "One page. Don't make it pretty."

I wrote for ten minutes.

He read it standing at the window, and then he read it again.

"The fourth line," he said. "'People don't buy breakfast, they buy ten calm minutes before the day starts.' You put that on slide four of the Stroud pitch two years ago. Word for word."

"It's my sentence."

"My lawyer says Stroud owns the slide." He set the pad down. "I say Stroud doesn't own whoever keeps writing it. Your hand is steady, by the way. People who are unwell don't press that hard."

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