I Married a Stranger to Ruin Them novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: A Better One

I called my lawyer from the loading dock with the letter in my hand.

She read it on her end and swore, which made me like her more.

"It's a bully letter," she said. "They can't own what's in your head. But they can make you prove it, and proving it takes money and about three years."

"And while I'm proving it?"

"You don't sell anything that looks like LUMEN."

I thanked her and hung up.

The river was high and brown and fast.

Matt came out with two mugs and handed me one.

"Bad?" he said.

"Tori wants my brain."

"She can't have it. It's in use."

I drank the coffee.

It was decaf.

I looked at the mug, then at him.

"You're not supposed to have the real stuff," he said, to the river. "I looked it up. Two hundred milligrams a day. You were at about six hundred last week."

"You counted my coffee."

"I count everything. I'm a glassblower. Seconds, degrees, coffee."

I stood there with the warm mug in my hands and the letter in my pocket.

"I'm not going to fight them for LUMEN," I said.

He turned and looked at me.

"It's mine," I said. "I know it's mine. But it's in their bottles now, on their shelves, with Tori's name on the box. If I spend three years in court getting it back, I get back a thing that's already going brown."

"So what do you do?"

"I make a better one."

"Can you?"

I thought about the six years.

About every mistake I'd made in Lawrenceville and every fix I'd never had time to try because the launch kept moving up.

"Yes," I said. "I've been carrying the better one around for two years. Ian kept saying LUMEN was good enough."

"Good enough," Matt said, like it tasted bad.

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