Chapter 19: The Counter-Suit

Patrick went down to the lobby alone, and I watched the elevator numbers from my bed.

He came back in ten minutes with the large box in his arms.

"Bradley stayed behind the guards," he said. "He didn't come near the stairs. He wouldn't leave until I took this."

"What is it?"

"Marilyn's files." Patrick set the box on the chair.

"Payments to the doctor, thirty-two years of them. And a folder with Bradley's name on it."

"What did he say?"

"That he'll testify against his mother. He asked me to tell you one thing."

Patrick looked at the baby asleep on my chest.

"He said he stopped wanting his turn with her the moment he read that folder."

I did not open it that night.

Ten days later I walked into the courthouse with my daughter in a sling against my chest.

Patrick walked beside me, carrying the diaper bag.

Marilyn's lawyers had filed to void the license on the grounds that Bradley had signed it under a mistake.

If they won, Littlebird went back to Alden Technologies, and Bradley's company got everything I had built.

Marilyn sat at the petitioner's table in a gray prison cardigan, her silver bob flattened, her pearls gone.

She would not look at me.

"The respondent calls the lawyer who drafted the license," Bea said.

He was an old man in a bow tie, who had been my grandmother's lawyer for forty years.

He took the oath slowly.

"I drafted it the week before the wedding," he said. "Cora's grandmother asked me to. She was afraid of exactly this."

"Did you explain it to the groom?" Bea asked.

"At breakfast, on the wedding morning, in plain words. Clause nine lets Ms. Lindell revoke on forty-eight hours' notice. He initialed every page."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Toasted His Mistress at My Shower, So I Killed His App from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.