THE USELESS HUSBAND'S BILLION DOLLAR REVENGE

6: The Better Attorney

"Her name is Joan Fisk."

Sable said it across the phone without preamble, two minutes after Ethan picked up.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning. Joan Fisk. She handles IP litigation for four of the largest tech companies in the country. She is expensive, she is blunt to the point of being alarming, and she has never lost a case that mattered. I am texting you her number now." A pause. "Call her this morning."

"You said yesterday I should let you recommend without choosing," he said.

A brief quiet. Then: "I said you should use the recommendation rather than let me choose it for you. That is what I am doing. The choice is still yours." Another pause. "But call her this morning."

He was sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of tea and a legal pad on which he had written a list of twelve questions during the night. He looked at the list now.

"What should I say to her?" he asked.

"Tell her you have a patent that is about to be attacked and you need it defended at commercial scale. Tell her Helion Capital will be covering her retainer as part of the partnership arrangement. And tell her you expect to hear everything she finds, including the bad news, before she tells you the good news."

"Why the bad news first?"

"Because that is how you tell a good attorney from a great one," she said. "The good ones lead with reassurance. The great ones lead with reality." She paused. "Joan always leads with reality."

She ended the call.

His phone buzzed immediately with a contact card.

He looked at it. Joan Fisk, Fisk and Associates, Patent Litigation and IP Defense. The address was downtown, twelve blocks from the garage. He almost smiled at that.

He called the number.

It rang once.

"Fisk."

The voice was a woman's, low and brisk, the voice of someone who answers the phone the way a surgeon makes an incision. No extra movement.

"Ethan Cross," he said. "Sable Reyes gave me your number. I have a patent situation."

"What kind?"

"The kind where someone else wants what I've built and will try to take it."

A short pause. He could hear her picking up something, a pen perhaps. "How long has the patent been filed?"

"Full application was accepted fourteen months ago. Provisional was on file for twelve months before that."

"Any challenges filed against it?"

"Not yet, as far as I know."

"As far as you know," she repeated, with the tone of someone who has heard that phrase before and knows exactly what it tends to precede. "Who is the threat?"

"Meridian Global. Possibly others."

Another pause. Longer this time. He heard the sound of something being set on a desk.

"Are you available at two o'clock today?" she said.

"Yes."

"Come to the office. Bring every piece of documentation related to the filing, the original provisional, the full application, any correspondence with the patent office, any communications from third parties regarding the technology, and anything else that touched this patent from the moment you had the idea to this morning." She paused. "Do you have all of that?"

"Everything is organized."

A beat. "Good. Two o'clock."

She hung up.

He looked at his kitchen. He got up, went to the bedroom closet, and lifted down a cardboard box from the top shelf. He had been keeping it there for two years, behind a bag of old clothes. Inside the box, in four labelled folders, was everything Joan Fisk had asked for and more. Research notes. Cost calculations. Correspondence with suppliers he had contacted when testing material specifications. Draft letters to companies he had considered approaching before he understood the scale of what he was working with. And a single folded sheet of paper that was his original sketch of the concept, done in pencil at three in the morning at this same kitchen table, three years ago.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the sketch for a moment.

It was not pretty. It was not organized. It looked like the handwriting of a person who is trying to keep up with an idea that is moving faster than the pen. Arrows going in multiple directions. Numbers crossed out and replaced. A small drawing in the corner that started as a diagram and turned into something abstract, the kind of mark your hand makes when your mind is somewhere else.

He folded it carefully and put it back in the folder.

He spent the rest of the morning going through the box and arranging everything in chronological order, a task that did not take long because, as Pete had observed years ago, Ethan's organization was almost pathological. Every document was dated. Every note referenced the documents that preceded it. He had kept records the way a scientist keeps records, which is what he had been all along, inside the ordinary life of a mechanic.

At one o'clock he put on a jacket and picked up the box and took the bus downtown.

Joan Fisk's office was on the seventeenth floor of a building that smelled like carpet cleaner and old decisions. The receptionist looked at his box without comment and showed him to a meeting room. He sat down and waited.

Joan Fisk arrived at exactly two o'clock. She was sixty, or near enough, with silver hair cut short and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She wore a dark jacket and no jewelry except a plain watch. She sat down across from him, pulled the glasses off the chain, and looked at the box.

"Is that everything?" she said.

"Everything from the beginning."

She pulled the box toward her and began going through it. She did not make conversation. She read. Occasionally she made a note on a legal pad. Once she held a page up to the light as if checking something. She went through the entire box in forty-five minutes, which impressed him because he had assumed it would take at least twice that.

She set the last folder down.

She looked at him over the reading glasses.

"Bad news first," she said. "Which is what you want, according to Sable."

"Yes."

"Your original provisional lacked two specific claim dependencies that should have been included from the start. Your full application's attorney caught one of them and corrected it. He missed the other. This creates a narrow window in claim six that a skilled adversary could attempt to exploit. Meridian Global employs exactly this kind of skilled adversary. The window is narrow enough that a successful challenge is unlikely but not impossible." She looked at him steadily. "That is the bad news."

"What's the good news?"

"The good news is that I have closed wider windows than this one." She removed the glasses from her face entirely and set them on the table. "Your documentation is extraordinary. I have been doing this for thirty-one years, and the quality of the supporting research material in this box is more thorough than filings I have seen from university research departments with teams of ten. The chain of evidence for the development of this concept is clear, consistent, and dated." She paused. "Whoever you are, Mr. Cross, you were meticulous in a way that will make my job significantly easier."

"I'm a mechanic," he said.

"I know," she said. "Sable told me. It doesn't change anything I just said."

She closed the box.

"I'll take the case," she said. "My retainer is thirty thousand dollars. Sable indicated she's authorizing that through the partnership arrangement, which means I'll invoice Helion Capital. Is that correct?"

"That's correct."

"Then we begin today. I'll file a supplementary claim amendment to close the gap in claim six by end of week. I'll also put Meridian Global on notice that this patent is actively defended at full commercial scale." She stood up. "One question."

"Go ahead."

"SkyBridge Technologies." She said it without inflection. "Their CEO is your estranged wife."

"Yes."

"Is there any documentation of her having knowledge of or contact with this patent or its underlying technology prior to its filing?"

He thought carefully.

"I mentioned the general concept to her once, approximately two years ago," he said. "She did not engage with it. No written communication between us exists about it."

Joan Fisk nodded once, slowly.

"Keep it that way," she said. "Do not communicate with her about the patent. Do not communicate with anyone at SkyBridge about it. If she contacts you, direct her to this office." She picked up her glasses and put them back on the chain. "And Mr. Cross."

"Yes."

"The technology you have developed will, if commercialized as designed, make you one of the most important figures in the energy sector within five years." She said it the way she had said everything else, flat and certain, the weather report of an experienced forecaster. "People are going to try to take that from you. I will make sure they cannot."

She offered her hand.

He took it.

Her grip was exactly as firm as it needed to be.