The Finance Director Asked Me To Bring The Original Contract

“Malcolm Reed, individually,” I read.

“Not Wickett?” Farah asked.

“Not Wickett.”

“Please don't explain the whole history yet. Tell me the agreement date and the parties.”

I gave her both. Paper moved at her end of the line.

“Our data room has a heat arrangement summary,” she said. “It lists Wickett as the customer.”

“Wickett is the approved user. Those are different things.”

“I'm beginning to see that.”

Farah was forty-four, a Pakistani American woman with dark eyes and black hair pinned low at her neck. I knew her from two plant visits. She had spent the first asking where a forecast number came from and the second waiting while Kent failed to find it.

She asked me to bring the original to the hotel meeting room where her team had set up.

“I need your permission to show it to our lawyer,” she said.

“You have it. The settlement has no secrecy clause.”

At eleven, I sat across from her with the gray folder between us. She wore a plain blue jacket. Kent's closing gifts, four leather document cases, stood untouched against the wall.

She checked my driver's license against the contract.

“Walk me through this.”

In 2017, Wickett had run short of cash. I had already spent $86,000 of my own savings building a pilot heat loop under a separate project agreement. The company owed me that money and a design fee.

When it refused to pay, I sued.

“You kept working there?” she asked.

“I had a crew. I liked the work. We settled before trial.”

Instead of cash, Wickett had given up its claim to a long-term waste-heat supply contract with Blue Heron Kiln. Blue Heron had agreed in writing. All three parties had signed the settlement and the new contract.

I held the right to receive the kiln's surplus heat and make it available to the named Wickett plant. Wickett paid me a $3,200 monthly contract fee. The company's pipes and exchangers stayed company property.

“So you don't own their machinery,” Farah said.

“Correct. I own the supply right. I stayed on salary to run the equipment.”

She found paragraph eleven.

“No assignment of this agreement, or substitution of the approved receiving operator, without the holder's written consent.”

She read the next sentence silently, then again aloud.

“A sale of the receiving plant's operating assets constitutes such a substitution.”

“That's your deal,” I said. “An asset sale.”

“Yes.”

She held the paper flat with both palms.

“Has anyone asked for your consent?”

“No.”

“Has anyone bought this right from you?”

“No.”

She called her lawyer, Graham Bellis, and turned on the speaker. He asked whether any later paper changed paragraph eleven.

I showed Farah the signed amendment from two years earlier. It raised the required maintenance reserve to $18,000 each month. It also said every other term remained in force.

“This was signed by Avery?” Graham asked.

“His signature's on page three.”

Farah looked at it for a long time.

“Our forecast assumes this supply continues for twelve years,” she said. “Without it, we lose $4.8 million in annual drying sales at the planned capacity.”

“The backup boilers can't cover that load,” I said.

“What would replacement heat cost?”

“You'll need a fuel study. Anybody giving you one quick number is selling something.”

She almost smiled.

Then her phone lit up with Kent's name.

“We're reviewing a missing consent,” she told him.

I could hear his voice without the speaker.

“It's an employee invention. We own it.”

“This is a signed settlement concerning a supply contract,” she said. “Send every amendment you have.”

He asked who had brought it to her.

She looked at me. I nodded.

“Mr. Reed.”

Kent went quiet. Then he wanted to speak to me.

“You could have brought this up before today,” he said.

“I asked who was taking charge of the reserve.”

“Don't turn a routine departure into a problem.”

“Fund the reserve. Show the records. Then we can discuss consent.”

“How much are you asking for?”

“The amount your company promised the equipment.”

Farah wrote down $432,000 and drew a square around it.

After the call, she asked me whether I planned to stop the heat.

“No. Existing service stays under the existing agreement. My consent is about a new operator.”

“Put that in an email.”

I did, using the hotel's guest computer while she watched. She gave me a copy of the message and a receipt for the scanned documents. I took my originals home.

At twelve forty, Farah postponed the signing.

At four, a courier knocked on my door with a letter demanding that I surrender all company property, including the contract in my kitchen drawer.