I boarded my husband’s private jet and his secretary was in my seat, feeding him peeled orange. His mother told me to be considerate. I stepped off. Then the crew asked whether I wanted the flight cancelled.

We met at eleven the following morning, in a hotel bar, which is the sort of detail that sounds dramatic and was actually just the only place open.

Here is what he had.

She is not new.

That is the first thing Daxon said, in a hotel bar, before he had even sat down properly.

She has been on a payroll for eleven months — not the company’s. A separate consulting entity, registered in another state, with a name that means nothing.

And that entity has taken four consulting payments. Eleven thousand, nine thousand, eleven thousand, and twenty-two.

Not large. That is the point. Nothing in this story is large except the thing at the end of it.

All four fall within forty-eight hours of meetings about the ownership of those thirteen patents.

Four out of four. Not four out of forty.

Daxon put those two columns on a tablet, turned it round, and said nothing at all.

That is how you show somebody something when you have been a chief financial officer for nine years and you have worked out that whatever you say next will be the thing they remember you saying.

I looked at it for about four minutes. He drank his coffee.

But the money is not the point, and it took Daxon about four minutes to make me understand why.

The seat is.

Because the patent licensing agreement — mine, the one everything rests on — has an automatic renewal clause.

And that clause depends on my remaining an active member of the board.

Active is defined. It is in schedule four, at clause eleven, and it is not a vague word in that document.

I know this because I asked for it to be put in, in 2020, at the insistence of a lawyer I then stopped using because he was difficult.

I wrote my own trap four years ago, to protect myself.

And then I spent two years not attending the one meeting that kept it shut.

That is the actual shape of this story and it is not flattering to anybody, least of all me. Somebody found a door I had built and left unlocked.

There was a board meeting the following day, in the city that aircraft was flying to.

If I did not get on that plane, I missed my third consecutive meeting.

Three consecutive. That is the number in the schedule.

Not four. Not a majority of the year. Three in a row.