I Married a Stranger to Ruin Them novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Smiled While I Signed
Fired at her own launch party, eight weeks pregnant, Alice signs with a smile, tells the room the bottle is wrong and walks out, then finds the glassworks that made it dark and foreclosed and a stranger at the furnace.
My husband fired me from my own company on a Tuesday night, and my best friend handed me the pen.
I was eight weeks pregnant.
Nobody in that room knew.
I smiled the whole time I signed.
Downstairs, four hundred people were drinking champagne under a banner with one word on it.
LUMEN.
That was my serum.
Six years of my life in a little amber bottle.
I had worked out the formula at three in the morning in a rented lab in Lawrenceville, with a space heater and a phone that wouldn't hold a charge.
Tonight it had a launch party with an ice bar and a string quartet.
Ian found me by the ice bar at nine.
"Come upstairs for two minutes, sweetheart."
He only called me sweetheart when he was lying.
I went anyway.
The executive suite looked down over the whole party through a wall of glass.
Tori was already there, in a cream blazer, sitting in my chair.
She had been my best friend since our first chemistry lab in college.
She stood up and hugged me, and her perfume was the one I'd bought her for her birthday.
"I'm so sorry, Al," she said. "I fought for you. I really did."
Then she handed me a folder.
The investors' man was at the end of the table, looking at his phone.
I opened the folder.
TERMINATION FOR CAUSE.
"Somebody emailed your lab notes to a competitor in January," Ian said. "It came from your account."
"I didn't send anything in January."
"The board's decided." He put his hand on my shoulder. "Let's not make this ugly, sweetheart. Not tonight."
I read the page.
My shares were frozen pending review.
Tori was the new Chief Product Officer.
Her name was printed right under the line where mine used to be.
My hand went to my stomach before I could stop it.
I moved it to the table instead.
I thought about the two pink lines on the test in our bathroom drawer.
I had been saving them for after the party.
I had pictured Ian's face.
I looked at him now.
He was checking his watch.
"Is there a pen?" I said.
Tori held one out.
It was my pen. The silver one with my initials, from my desk.
I took it and signed my name, neat and slow.
Then I smiled at both of them.
Tori's face slipped for a second.
She had come ready for crying.
She didn't know what to do with a smile.
"No hard feelings," she said.
"Of course not," I said.
I put the pen in my pocket and walked out.
The elevator opened on the party.
The quartet was playing something I didn't know.
In the middle of the room was a tower of LUMEN bottles, eight feet high, lit from underneath.
Reporters were taking pictures of it.
I walked across the floor and people went quiet around me in a ring.
Everybody had already heard.
I took a bottle off the tower.
It was the right color amber.
It was the wrong weight.
I held it up to the lights.
The glass was smooth and thin and perfect, with a seam running up the side where a machine had pressed it.
My bottle didn't have a seam.
My bottle was blown by hand, in a little glassworks up the Allegheny, out of old amber glass that kept the light from turning the serum brown.
I had driven up there myself six years ago and shaken the owner's hand.
Ian came out of the elevator behind me with Tori at his elbow.
"Alice," he said, smiling for the cameras. "Let's not."
I turned the bottle so the reporters could see the seam.
"This isn't my bottle," I said.
The room was dead silent.
Tori's smile went stiff.
"It's the same bottle," she said. "We just found a better supplier."
"Cheaper," I said. "You found a cheaper one."
I set it back on the tower, very gently.
"In six weeks it'll be brown," I said. "Every one of them."
Ian took my elbow and leaned in close.
"You're done," he whispered. "Walk out with some dignity."
I took his hand off my arm.
"You'll hear from my lawyer," I said, loud enough for the front row. "About the company, and about the marriage."
I walked out past the ice bar and the banner and my own face on the founders' wall.
Nobody stopped me.
In the car I sat with both hands on the wheel and shook for ten minutes.
Then I drove north.
The glassworks was an hour up the river, in a town with one stoplight.
It was after midnight when I pulled in.
The brick building by the water was dark.
There was a paper taped to the front door.
NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE. SHERIFF'S SALE, JUNE 1.
I stood there in my party dress and read it twice.
Then I saw the orange glow through a side window.
Somebody was still working.
I went around the back and pushed open a heavy steel door.
The heat hit me.
A big man in a leather apron was turning a pipe in the mouth of the furnace, a ball of glass glowing on the end of it.
He had burn scars up both forearms and sweat running into his beard.
"I need to talk to Mr. Ashbaugh," I said.
He didn't look up from the glass.
"He's dead."
I didn't move.
"He died in January," the man said. "I'm his son."
He finally looked at me, at the dress and the heels, and he knew exactly who I was.
"And your company canceled our order three weeks ago, lady. So if you came to say sorry, the door's behind you."
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