My Wife Cut My Access Before The Investor Preview Began

The password failed while I held a puppet's face in my lap.

Moss, our wooden tollkeeper, had lost his left cheek string. Without it, his shy smile looked like a sneer. I tied a red witness thread around the empty hole in his control bar. It marked where the new string belonged.

Then I tried the tour account again.

Access removed.

Outside our rented shop in Staunton, a truck climbed the hill toward downtown. Inside, my wife arranged paper cups beneath a sign that read OUR NEXT GREAT SEASON.

“Cressida. Did you change the bank login?”

“And the booking calendar. Please finish that face before people arrive.”

I was thirty-one, a mixed-race man with brown skin, close-cut black curls, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

I designed marionettes and worked them on tour. I carved joints, balanced control bars, and repaired broken strings while keeping a puppet's expression in place. My wife called that the back room.

Cressida was thirty-four, a white woman with copper-red hair, blue eyes, and a wide smile she could turn on before anyone raised a camera.

That smile appeared when the first investor entered.

“There's my genius,” she said.

She kissed my cheek hard enough to turn my head. Then she handed me a box of empty cups.

“Could you take these downstairs, sweetheart?”

Six people had come to hear about our fall tour. Tessa, our stage manager, stood near the door in her work boots. She had driven from Waynesboro after a school show.

I stayed beside the bench.

Cressida tapped her slide remote.

“Lantern Span Touring is entering a new phase,” she said. “That includes a change in my personal life. Julian and I are dissolving our marriage.”

The room went still.

I set the cups down.

“We hadn't discussed that.”

“We discussed what wasn't working.” Her smile held. “You wanted to keep making things. I needed a partner who could bring in real money.”

Tessa looked at Moss. His repaired cheek lay beneath my thumb.

“The schools pay for those things,” she said.

“Schools pay for the experience I sell,” Cressida answered. “There's a difference.”

She moved to a slide showing three of my characters. Moss stood beside Nell of the Small Door and the little moon porter I had carved on my mother's kitchen table.

Below them were the words COMPANY-OWNED CHARACTER LIBRARY.

“That line is wrong,” I said.

Cressida laughed as if I had made a private joke.

“Julian worries about labels.”

I looked at the faces in the room. One man lowered his pen. Another looked away.

I could have shouted. Instead, I put Moss on his padded stand. A slack hand string could pull his whole shoulder loose if someone picked him up wrong.

“Please send me the presentation,” I said.

“We'll discuss your concerns later.”

The preview ended early. Nobody touched the last three cups of coffee.

At the door, Cressida caught my sleeve.

“Don't make this ugly. The company has the money. The company has the work. You'll receive a fair separation offer.”

“And the crew?”

“They can stay if they're useful.”

“Their checks are due Friday.”

“Then don't upset the people funding Friday.”

She left in her good coat. Through the glass, I watched her wave to an investor with both hands, full of warmth again.

Tessa stayed.

“Did you know?” she asked.

“No.”

“Should we start looking for other jobs?”

That hurt more than the room had.

“Give me until tomorrow to learn what's there,” I said. “I won't ask anyone to work without pay.”

After she left, I opened the flat metal case beneath my bench. Cressida had called it my paper graveyard. It held old patterns, signed assignments, and the first license for Nell.

I had designed the characters before our wedding. When other artists helped, I paid them and kept the papers that assigned their design work to me. Later, our tour company received permission to use the characters.

Permission and ownership were different boxes on those forms.

I had kept both boxes clear.

My personal email still worked. I searched for the latest quarterly licensing report. A theater in North Carolina had paid $31,200 for a year of school performances using Nell.

The report showed Lantern Span as collection agent.

An attached receipt named Hearthwake Production Services as the final payee.

I had never heard of Hearthwake.

At 8:17, a message from Cressida arrived with a separation agreement. It gave me $4,000 and required me to release “all claims concerning characters, designs, and related income.”

I left it unsigned on the screen and called Malcolm Chen, our licensing agent.

“Sorry it's late,” I said.

“Tell me the attachment names,” he said softly.

I read them aloud.

He stopped me at the receipt.

“Julian,” he said, “send that before you sign anything.”