Preston Called My Workshop Worthless During Our First Mediation Session

The beacon on my bench made a thin, uneven whine while my husband explained that I had never earned a dollar.

I could hear both faults through my headset.

"Laurel has a hobby," Preston told the divorce mediator. "I paid for the room. I found her things to do."

I put a blue paper dot on the beacon's case.

Blue meant a fault still needed proof. I never peeled a dot off just because someone told me a thing worked.

The mediator, Ellen, looked at me through the laptop screen.

"Is that a fair description?"

"No," I said. "I calibrate avalanche beacons. This one has a bad power circuit."

"We mean the business," Preston said.

"So do I."

I was twenty-five, a white woman with gray eyes, a blunt brown braid, and a small solder burn beside my left thumb. That morning, my braid had caught in the headset cord twice. Preston had already told me I looked unprepared.

Preston was a white man of thirty-one, tall and trim, with neat blond hair, blue eyes, and a smile that never reached them.

He sold outdoor equipment to shops and guide services. He could make a late shipment sound like a gift. At home, he kept the banking passwords because, he said, numbers made me tired.

Small numbers did not make me tired. Neither did large ones.

I worked above a garage on the north side of Fort Collins. When the door below opened, cold air slipped through the floor. On clear days, I could see a white edge of the foothills from the west window.

People sent me beacons before trips up Poudre Canyon. I checked their signal, timing, battery load, and range against a known unit.

The radio signal was too high for human ears. The power circuits sometimes were not. A faint whine could tell me where to start looking.

Three years earlier, Preston had called that useful.

"Your little bat ears," he had said, kissing my forehead while I soldered a board.

Now he called my work a hobby.

"The shop account received nothing last year," he told Ellen. "I can provide statements."

"Please do," I said.

His smile held. "Of course."

I had spent the past month asking for our records. Each time, he had sent a grocery total or a photo of the rent check. He said I would understand the rest once I stopped being upset about Dana.

Dana Pike was his new partner in business and in bed. He had announced both facts over breakfast, as if he were changing shipping firms.

"This doesn't need to get ugly," he had said.

I had asked where the licensing checks went.

He had asked whether I wanted toast.

Now Ellen requested a full account list and paused the session for document exchange. She was a mediator, she reminded us. She could ask for records. She could not order a bank to hand them over.

After the call, Preston rang my phone.

"Why embarrass yourself?"

I turned the bad beacon over. "You said it earned nothing."

"Your room earned nothing. My relationships brought in the money."

"Whose invention did they license?"

"Don't start with the patent again."

He hung up before I could answer.

Under my bench sat a flat steel drawer. It held the original patent assignment, my early circuit notes, and a cream envelope from a licensing escrow service.

Preston knew about the drawer. He thought it held old manuals.

I took out the assignment. Its first page carried my name as owner. The filing receipt was dated eleven months before our wedding.

He had called my circuit his prototype often enough that other people did too. I had stopped correcting him at dinners. That had been a mistake. It had not been a transfer.

My invention was a test board that found a certain power fault while a beacon still looked healthy on a simple bench check. North Fork Instruments had licensed it for its service stations.

Preston had permission to collect routine royalties through his broker clearing account. He had no right to change the owner or keep the money.

A separate $62,400 production payment waited in escrow. Only my verified instructions could release it to me.

At least, that was what the cream envelope said.

I called the accountant whose name appeared on the annual notice.

"Beatriz Salcedo," a woman answered.

"I'm Laurel Whitcomb. I need to know whether a payment address changed."

Keys clicked.

"Which one?" she asked.

"How many are there?"

The keys stopped.

"Bring your assignment tomorrow. Bring identification. Bring anything your husband says doesn't matter."

An email arrived before I set down the phone. Its subject was Request To Replace Escrow Beneficiary.

The new beneficiary was Dana's company.