Chapter One
I sighed as I pushed the small pile of paperwork on my desk to the side, into the stack that would simply have to wait until tomorrow. It seemed like no matter how much I got through in a day, there was an endless supply of it that would be there, sitting and taunting me.
Yes. The paperwork is taunting you. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that it’s part of the job. I rubbed my head with the tips of my fingers, the stressed out thoughts fighting for the dominant spot in my head. It had been a long day, and an even longer week, the hours stretching into endless measurements of time that seemed determined to be as difficult as possible. My head was throbbing from the complications that had arisen with one of our clients, a man that was filing his first patent with our company, and who was the problem that had been preoccupying my time when I should have been working on other things.
They were claiming that their rights had been violated in part, something about a breach of confidentiality on their patent, which hadn’t even technically been sealed yet. I was head of the patent research and enforcement team. Most of the research legwork was done by the up and comers, the same type of person that I had been when I’d first started here.
But even with my standing there, this wasn’t something that should have come across my desk. There was no way that I should have even had to worry about the mess that the case had become, but the two partners who owned the business where off gallivanting around the world, nearly impossible to reach unless they wanted to be, and the other executive who ran the office with me had his head so far up his backside that I was always surprised he was able to find his way in the front door of the building. The immediate board members were demanding answers, and there was no one else besides me qualified or willing to take on dealing with the case, hiring the lawyer, and seeing it through.
I had been a part of Trestmont Inc. for nearly eight years, and had been an executive, and acting member of the board, for the last two. I had poured my blood, sweat and tears into building the company. I hadn’t done it single handedly by any means, but I’d certainly done more than my share of the work to make it what it was.
I had done all that I could for today, looking over the information and lining up an appointment with a lawyer for next week. I needed to go home, get some rest, and get all of this garbage out of my head for a little while. Maybe even call my mother, who I hadn’t made the time to talk to in nearly a month.
When was the last time you ever made time for her? I thought irritably to myself.
When I’d gotten a scholarship to the state university of my choice, I had left the two bedroom apartment that she’d moved us to after my father passed away, and put myself through school at a pace that was unthinkable to most people. Eighteen hours most semesters, fifteen at the end when I got down to my senior level classes. I only went home for holidays on occasion, one day, maybe two, at a time.
And that had been my life. No second guessing where I wanted to go, or how hard I was willing to work to get there, aside from the small blip on my resume that had deviated from the corporate world. I had thought that I was interested in teaching, helping people in that way, before I found out that standardized testing was taking over the profession, and that they got paid next to nothing. Still, a double major looked good on any resume, so I proceeded, entirely unsure what I would do with it when I was done with college; but knowing that having both business and educational skills couldn’t hurt me in the long run.
Working in a corporate firm, my first choice of careers hadn’t been quite as fulfilling as the idealized version I had built up in my head. But it did give me a comfortable lifestyle, allowed me to interact with people and in this kind of economy, I couldn’t ask for more. At the time I consoled myself with the saying that my father used to say when he would come home from a long day of work: “They wouldn’t call it work if you enjoyed it.”
I just had no idea at the time that the effort it had taken to get me there, that the money and stability that I had become used to, wasn’t going to last forever. That last day was the proverbial calm before the storm. The final time that I would experience the normality that my life had started to revolve around.