Chapter Twenty-Two
Rhys
LUCY HART STERLING. DESIGN DIRECTOR (UNPAID).
“This,” Margot said, “is the whole case.”
“A title,” Margot said. “Published by the company, on the company’s own website, for years.
She attended design meetings. She directed contractors on company job sites.
She lived in a residence on company grounds and traveled on the company’s dime.
Courts don’t look at the paycheck. They look at the relationship.
Who controlled the work. Whose projects.
” Click. A photo of Lucy at a Glenbrook site meeting, rolled plans under her arm, STERLING stenciled across the front of her hard hat.
“Those are Sterling projects. That’s a Sterling hard hat. Work made for hire.”
“It’s a strong argument,” Summit’s counsel said. His voice came through half a second late. “It isn’t a clean one.”
“It doesn’t need to be clean,” Margot said. “It needs to be better than hers.”
One of the Denver board members leaned toward his camera. “Walk me through it for the non-lawyers. If this holds, the company owns the drawings.”
“The company owns the drawings,” Margot said, “and Sterling House closes as structured.”
“And if it doesn’t hold?”
Dev answered that one. “Then Summit’s buying a brand somebody else can pull out from under us. We won’t do that.”
Somebody in the little boxes said, “So it has to hold.”
That was the moment the room tipped. I felt it the way you feel a chairlift start to swing.
Nobody voted. Nobody had to. Heads nodded in their boxes.
The beige hotel room said, “Seems like the only path.” The man in the car said, “Agreed.” Our general counsel typed something and angled her screen an inch toward me.
Say nothing. Let the board own it.
I read it twice.
Here’s the thing about the website. I wrote that line.
Not Margot. Not the web guy. Me. It was eleven at night in the owner’s house, the web guy needed bios by morning, and I was typing at the kitchen island with a beer while Lucy sat on the floor with Juniper’s head in her lap.
What do I call you? I’d asked her. She’d said, Call me whatever you want, you’re the one with the words.
So I typed Design Director, and then I added (unpaid) because I thought it was funny.
She laughed. I remember being so pleased with myself that she laughed.
That was their case. A joke I made to get a laugh out of my wife.
“Rhys.” The Denver board member. “You’ve been quiet. Where are you on this?”
Every box on the screen turned toward me, which isn’t something boxes can do, but they did.
I did what I do. I opened my hands on the walnut and smiled and felt the pitch come up in me like warm water.
“I think we’re all on the same side here,” I said. “Nobody in this room wants to make this us against Lucy. What if we step back from the legal framing for a second and look at a licensing structure that lets everybody walk away—”
“She’s already turned down five million dollars,” Margot said.
“Then we find the number.”
“It isn’t a number. Her lawyer wants her name on the rooms.” Margot set the clicker down very gently, the way you set down a glass you want to throw. “You were there.”
I was there. I’d said no NDA across a table in San Francisco and felt like a hero for about four hours.
“So we pursue work for hire,” said the beige hotel room. “Is that the sense of the board?”
It was the sense of the board. Our general counsel said she’d have a response to Ms. Tran by Friday. Dev said, “Rhys, call me after,” and his box went black, and the others went black one at a time, and then it was just Margot and me and the lake.
She packed up. She didn’t hurry.
“It’s the only way this closes,” she said. “You know that.”
“She never took a dime.”
“That’s the part a judge will find sweet.” She tucked her laptop under her arm and stopped at the door. “You wrote the website copy, Rhys. I remember. Don’t be the one who says so.”
Then she was gone, and our general counsel closed her laptop and looked at me for the first time all morning.
“I’m going to say this once, as your lawyer and the company’s,” she said. “Until this resolves, don’t discuss the matter with your wife.”
“She’s my wife.”
“She’s the adverse party.”
* * *
Jonah was in the rental shop, and the rental shop smelled the way it always does in October: hot wax, wet wool, and the ghost of every kid who ever cried in a boot a size too small.
No snow yet. The racks were half-empty. He had a board clamped to the bench and an iron in his hand, dripping blue wax in a slow line down the base, and he didn’t look up when I came in.
“Heard about the board call,” he said.
“You’re not on the board.”
“I’m your brother. Dev called me.” He set the iron on its stand. “He said you did the thing with your hands.”
I looked down. They were doing it now, a little, open and reasonable. I shoved them in my jacket pockets.
“They’re going to argue she worked for us.” I told him the rest. The hard hat. The house. (unpaid). The beer, the kitchen island, the way she’d laughed. “I wrote it, Jo. I wrote the line they’re going to use against her.”
He picked up a plastic scraper and started taking the wax back off in long blue curls, and for a minute that was the only sound.
Jonah’s always been able to make me wait.
When we were kids he was the one who’d sit on the trailer step with his arms around his knees and not say a word until Dad’s truck was gone for sure.
“You know what she did in 2019?” he said.
“The rental line used to go out that door and halfway across the lot. Kids freezing. Parents losing their minds. She stood right there”—he pointed the scraper at the doorway—“for an hour with a tape measure and a notebook, and the next week Owen came down and built these racks exactly how she drew them. Line’s been inside ever since.
Nobody paid her for that either. She did it because she saw cold kids. ”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He blew the curls off the base. “Because what Dev described to me was a guy hunting for a deal where everybody wins. There isn’t one, Rhys. Somebody’s telling the truth and somebody isn’t.”
“If I go against the board, the deal dies. Summit walks. Four hundred million dollars—”
“Then it dies.”
“It’s not just me. It’s every housekeeper at four lodges who’s been told Sterling House means raises next year.”
“Housekeepers don’t need you lying about your wife.
” He finally looked at me. He’s got our mother’s eyes, and he uses them on me exactly the way she does.
“You’ve been pitching your whole life, man.
Lift tickets. Condos. You sold Glenbrook to a bank off a sketch she drew on a napkin.
You’re great at it. Everybody knows you’re great at it.
Stop selling and start telling the truth. ”
I stood there with my hands in my pockets.
“Say it to me,” Jonah said. “Not to the board. To me. Was she ever an employee?”
“No.”
“She ever get a paycheck?”
“No.”
“She ever sign anything that gave you her drawings?”
“No. I never put one piece of paper in front of her. Not once in ten years.” It came out rough. “It never occurred to me they were hers to give. I thought—”
I stopped. I’d thought they were ours. I’d thought ours meant mine, and I’d never once noticed the difference.
“There you go,” Jonah said. He picked the iron back up. “That’s not a pitch. That’s three answers. Go say them to somebody who writes things down.”
* * *
I called from the truck in the empty lot, engine off, the lake flat and gray through the windshield.
Our general counsel picked up on the first ring, which meant she’d been expecting it.
“Rhys.”
“I want to make a statement. Under oath.”
I heard her pen stop. “About what?”
“About Lucy. About the website. I wrote that line. It was a joke.”
“Rhys—”
“She was never on payroll. No W-2, no 1099, no contract. She never cashed a check with our name on it. She never signed an assignment, because I never asked her to.”
A long pause. “You understand what you’re describing. You’d be contradicting the company’s position. In writing, under penalty of perjury. Summit’s counsel will have it within the hour, and so will the board, and so will Ms. Tran. The work-for-hire argument dies the day you sign it.”
“Good.”
“The deal may die with it.”
“Then it dies.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It didn’t sound like anybody selling anything. “I spent ten years letting other people write my wife’s title. I’m done.”
She was quiet. When she spoke again she sounded, for the first time since I’d hired her, almost like a person.
“Are you sure?”
I looked at my hands on the wheel. They were still.
“Draft a sworn declaration,” I said. “Lucy Hart was never an employee of Sterling Resorts. She was never paid. She never assigned us anything. I’ll sign it tonight.”