“No,” I said.
I looked around at the pages spread across my floor.
“This is what the company used to be.”
That was when the idea became real.
I was not going to begin with a lawsuit.
I was going to begin with a greenhouse.
We started small.
One section needed to be structurally safe and watertight.
That alone consumed weeks.
I replaced broken panes.
Repaired benches.
Worked on irrigation.
Brought in fresh soil.
The greenhouse changed slowly.
So did I.
Every repaired frame felt more useful than another argument with my family.
I used my savings to buy seed stock.
I contacted independent growers.
I tracked down heirloom varieties.
I began trying to recreate Genevieve’s old plants.
Kora worked on the visual identity.
She cleaned up one of Genevieve’s floral sketches into a simple logo.
We kept the colors quiet and organic—sage, dusty rose, deep brown.
Whitmore Gardens.
The Original Legacy.
We did not have the money for a large retail operation.
So we launched online.
The first version of the website was simple.
The homepage showed sunlight pouring through the restored section of the greenhouse onto rows of seedlings.
I started writing about the restoration.
About Genevieve.
About the old varieties.
About why I believed the name belonged with the property where it began.
My first posts attracted almost no attention.
Kora shared them.
A few gardening people followed.
Then a few more.
I kept posting.
Dirty hands.
New seedlings.
Repair work.
Old journal pages.
Plant histories.
Nothing glamorous.
Nothing corporate.
For the first time in years, I was doing work without wondering whether Dad thought it scaled.
The first warning arrived by email.
The subject line accused me of trademark infringement and unauthorized use of the Whitmore Gardens identity.
Terillux’s legal department demanded that I stop using the name.
Seeing the company’s name above paragraphs of legal language made my pulse jump.
This was no longer theoretical.
I forwarded the message to Arthur.
He called me ten minutes later.
“Do not answer it yourself.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
His response was almost disappointingly calm.
He identified me as the legal owner of the founding property, referenced the reversion provision, and informed Terillux of my claim to the Whitmore Gardens mark.
There were no threats.
No insults.
No speeches about justice.
Just the deed and the problem it created.
Then Terillux went silent.
A week passed.
Meanwhile, my audience began growing.