The Judge Asked Where My Permission Appeared On The Page

Monday morning, I wore the only jacket I owned that had never been under a safety vest.

Jo met me outside the courtroom. Althea stood beside her, holding a plain canvas bag.

"Did you sleep?" Jo asked.

"Some."

"Good enough. Answer slowly. Let me object if I need to."

Greer arrived with Voss and a second lawyer. She looked at my jacket, then at my shoes.

On the bench beside me, Jo put bright tabs on our copies. She gave me one last page to check. It listed the dates of every payment, with the bank record behind each entry. I found a transposed day, pointed it out, and watched her correct it before she handed it up.

I checked that my phone was off.

The judge began with the service issue.

"Is anyone asking to disconnect customers?"

"No, Your Honor," Jo said.

Voss agreed. He gave the court the temporary operating notes signed by all the right holders.

The judge read them before he heard another word.

Then Voss argued that I was using a minor record problem to hold up a major sale.

"Mr. Endo worked within the company. His interests were tied to its business."

"His employment certainly was," the judge said. "Show me the transfer of his license."

Voss offered the 2019 assignment, including Schedule C this time. He said Greer had understood later conduct to have changed the old arrangement.

Jo offered the annual payments.

"The later conduct followed the old arrangement," she said.

I took the witness stand. My voice sounded too loud in the little microphone.

Jo asked what I had paid in 2017.

"Twelve thousand six hundred dollars."

"Whose money?"

"Mine."

"Did Lowbank repay that amount?"

"No. It paid for use each year."

"Had you consented to Ridge Ledger taking over?"

"No one asked me before I was fired. I still hadn't signed an approval."

Voss asked why I had kept working if I believed I owned a valuable right.

"Because inspecting cable was my job."

"You never demanded a share of the company?"

"The contract didn't give me one."

"Yet you now wanted a share of this sale?"

"I hadn't asked for that either."

He stopped and checked his notes.

Althea testified about drafting the use agreement and its separate boundaries. Voss asked whether she could recall an old negotiation clearly after so many years.

"Some conversations, no," she said. "This boundary, yes. I had to redraw it because the first map included land Bellmouth didn't own."

Jo handed her the dated drawing.

"Is this your correction?"

"Yes. I put my initials beside the bracket."

The judge leaned forward.

"The west approach is outside the licensed property?"

"One hundred eighty-six feet of it."

Ruth's sworn statement and the deed map supported that answer. The trust's full claim would be handled separately, but its boundary mattered to the access promise before the court.

Greer testified next. She said she had believed my employee paperwork allowed her to clear routine matters.

Jo showed her the consent form.

"You signed as Mr. Endo's authorized agent?"

"To avoid a needless delay."

"Please identify his permission."

Greer pointed to the handbook page.

The judge read it, then looked up.

"This concerns corrections to hours worked. Where does he allow you to transfer his private contract rights?"

Greer reached for the water pitcher.

"That was my understanding."

"I asked where it appears on the page."

She had no place to point.

The judge entered a temporary order barring use of the disputed consent or any purported transfer of my license pending a fuller hearing. The existing service arrangements would continue.

He did not decide the two-million-dollar counterclaim that morning. Jo had already asked the company to state exactly what duty I had broken.

"An unsigned approval is not an outage," the judge said before we left.

In the hall, I sat on a bench and let my knees stop shaking. Althea took a small gray crane from her bag.

"From the map ledge," she said. "The field supervisor asked me to give it back."

One wing had been bent. I pressed it flat against my folder.

My phone buzzed. Mara had found another document in the sale files: an instruction from Greer to move the tunnel right into a new Lowbank subsidiary for one dollar, then sell that subsidiary.

It had been sent after our first notice.

Bellmouth had refused to approve it. The transfer had never taken effect.

At the courthouse doors, a woman in a dark raincoat waited beside Jo.

She introduced herself as Priya Solis, Lowbank's board chair.

"I'd like you both at our audit committee tomorrow," she said. "And I'd like to know why I received a different version of Schedule C."