I Set The Original Agreement Between The Closing Pens

“That isn't a signature I put on a license,” I said.

We stood on the office stairs, holding Mara's attachment between us on my phone. Under the signature was a date from the previous August.

“Don't guess where it came from,” Priya said. “Tell me what you know.”

“I didn't agree to this.”

She wrote those words down.

The closing office was in downtown Boise, above a bank lobby. Wet grit marked the elevator floor. I had worn my lab shoes, and one lace was stained with the red dye we used to check living seed tissue.

Sterling noticed the shoes first.

“This is a business meeting, Audrey.”

“Then the agreement belongs here.”

Priya set the hard case on the conference table. Mara sat across from us with two Morrowbend staff members. At the far end was Owen Pell, Rillbank's finance director and one of its three board members.

The closing pens lay in a straight row beside a bowl of wrapped mints.

Sterling reached for the case.

Priya kept a hand on it.

“You may inspect the agreement here. It stays in our custody.”

“It's company property.”

“It's the cooperative's executed counterpart.”

Mara asked everyone to sit.

Sterling remained standing until Owen pulled out his chair.

I opened the case and placed the agreement between the pens. Sterling looked at the coffee mark, then at his own ink stain.

“An old document,” he said.

“The license listed in your asset schedule,” Mara said. “Except our data room copy ended before the transfer section.”

“A scanning error.”

Priya laid out the full page list. The uploaded copy had pages one through seventeen, then the signature page. Section 14 began on page eighteen.

Mara turned to Sterling.

“Who approved that upload?”

“My assistant handles files.”

Owen looked up.

“Your assistant left in June.”

The room grew so quiet that I heard a mint wrapper crack under Sterling's thumb.

He pushed the amendment toward me.

“This replaced it anyway.”

The paper removed the steward's consent and allowed the company to buy out the cooperative for $40,000. It bore a picture of my signature and a block marked Cooperative Approval.

There was no board resolution number.

“I didn't sign this agreement,” I said.

“You signed everything we put in front of you.”

“I signed sample releases, chamber logs, and delivery receipts. I read them.”

Mara asked for the electronic signing certificate.

“We'll have IT find it,” Sterling said.

“Before any money moves,” she replied.

One buyer staff member closed the folder in front of him.

Sterling turned to me with the voice he used when a machine jammed.

“You were paid $58,000 a year to count sprouts. You don't get to hold up a deal worth nearly ten million.”

“You told everyone I was just the sprout counter,” I said. “The cooperative appointed me to hold this consent.”

I slid Schedule B toward him.

My name was on the page above his initials.

Owen asked whether the disputed license covered the actual lots in the sale. I gave him the parent lot numbers from memory, then asked him to check them against the asset list.

He read each one aloud.

“All six,” he said.

“The trial labels trace back to those parents,” I told Mara. “I can show the cross records in the cooperative archive.”

She added another note beside the purchase schedule.

“The growers own the reserve seed,” I added. “The company got permission to breed from it. That permission came with terms.”

Mara read the schedule twice.

“Closing is paused,” she said.

Sterling leaned back. He had not seemed worried when I arrived. Now he looked at Owen instead of me.

“How much will make her go away?”

Owen didn't answer.

Priya asked for a written hold on moving seed, deleting files, or changing the trial chambers while the dispute was reviewed.

“We won't destroy anything,” Sterling said.

“Then signing should be easy.”

He refused.

Mara said Morrowbend would not accept delivery of disputed seed. She asked Rillbank to preserve the signing records, upload history, and financial reports.

I took a breath before asking for one more thing.

“Chamber three needs a moisture check at noon. The tray list is clipped to the door.”

Sterling laughed.

“Still worried about your little spirals?”

“Those are live trial samples.”

Mara wrote down the chamber number.

As we packed the original, Owen asked Priya for her card. He held it beneath the table edge, then seemed ashamed and placed it in plain sight.

“I'll have records sent through counsel,” he said.

We walked out at 11:06. No one had signed the closing papers. No money had moved.

In the elevator, my phone buzzed with a message from Ben at reception.

A freight driver had arrived with an order to take every DF-17 seed lot out of Idaho.