Chapter 4 - DAD'S NAME ON MY INVENTION
Dad answered my call with a lawyer’s favorite tactic.
Technicality.
“It’s a provisional filing.”
“That doesn’t answer why your name is on it.”
“I contributed conceptual guidance.”
I almost dropped the phone.
“You told me to stop wasting time on software.”
“That was guidance.”
“No, Dad. That was contempt.”
He sighed as though I were an unreasonable client.
“Mia, ideas develop inside families. People talk. People influence one another.”
“Tell me one feature you invented.”
Silence.
“One.”
“That’s not how intellectual property works.”
I smiled.
Actually, it was close enough to how inventorship worked for my question to matter.
“You can explain your contribution to the acquisition attorneys.”
His tone changed.
“You’re threatening your own father?”
“No. I’m documenting him.”
That sentence ended the call.
Mom texted me an hour later.
Please come see me alone.
I almost refused.
Then I remembered her standing in the doorway while Dad threw me out.
Silence was a choice too.
Still, she was my mother.
We met at a coffee shop.
She looked ten years older than she had that morning.
“I’m sorry.”
“For which part?”
Her eyes filled.
“All of it.”
I waited.
Then she placed an old laptop on the table.
My laptop.
The one I had used during college.
“I thought I lost that.”
“Jason took it.”
My stomach tightened.
“When?”
“Last Thanksgiving.”
“Why?”
“He said you had old law-school outlines he needed.”
“And you gave it to him?”
“I didn’t know.”
I opened the laptop.
The drive still contained early prototypes, product notes, sketches, and test datasets.
Everything Jason would need to understand how my system developed.
Mom whispered, “There’s more.”
She pulled a folder from her bag.
Inside were incorporation documents.
Ridgewell Legal Technologies LLC.
Members:
Richard Bennett, fifty-one percent.
Jason Bennett, forty-nine percent.
Formation date:
Eight months earlier.
Dad and Jason had built a company together before BriefForge.
“What is Ridgewell?”
Mom looked terrified.
“I think it was supposed to own your software.”
Then she handed me one final document.
A licensing agreement.
May you like
My father had signed it six months earlier.
It promised his law firm exclusive rights to technology he did not own.
