“I’m still here, Sarah,” she said. “I assume you’re speaking with your advisors.”

“I’m speaking with Derek and Marcus,” I said.

“Then they should be telling you to sign,” she said.

“For three years, you told me my PhD was a waste of time,” I said, my voice steady.

The traffic on Palm Drive hummed in the distance.

“I told you it was impractical,” she corrected.

“You told everyone at the country club that I was doing ‘post-graduate charity work’ because you couldn’t explain solar grid efficiency to them,” I said.

“That is ancient history,” she said.

“You didn’t want me to build this,” I said. “You wanted me to marry a partner at a firm and sit on a hospital board. You tried to cut off my tuition allowance when I chose the lab over the internship you arranged.”

“I was trying to guide you toward a stable life,” she said.

“You were trying to build a trophy,” I said. “And now that Solar Reach is in the papers, now that Stanford is hosting our pilot, you want to buy your way into the legacy.”