Ethan laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“Your company?”
Victoria absorbed the correction.
“Me.”
“Yes.”
“Then me.”
She didn’t defend herself.
That almost made him angrier.
“You want forgiveness?”
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To give you the truth.”
“I already know the truth.”
Victoria shook her head.
“No, Ethan.”
He stared at her.
“I don’t think either of us does.”
She reached slowly into her coat.
Ethan stiffened.
Victoria withdrew a brown envelope.
“I reopened the internal archive.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should.”
“I spent eleven years learning not to.”
“There were files missing from your case.”
His expression changed slightly.
“Engineering logs. Internal emails. Testing records.”
“I asked for those.”
“I know.”
“They said they didn’t exist.”
“They did.”
Ethan looked at the envelope.
Victoria continued.
“And someone removed them before the investigation.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Convenient.”
“I expected you to say that.”
She extended the envelope.
Ethan didn’t take it.
“What’s inside?”
“One document.”
“What document?”
Victoria looked directly at him.
“The original equipment failure report.”
Ethan went completely still.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“That report never existed.”
“It did.”
“I was told—”
“You were lied to.”
His eyes dropped toward the envelope.
Eleven years.
Eleven years of being told he had misremembered.
Eleven years of wondering whether grief had distorted what he saw.
Eleven years of waking at 3:00 a.m. hearing alarms that no longer existed.
He finally took the envelope.
His fingers shook.
He hated that Victoria saw it.
Ethan tore it open.
One sheet.
Technical codes.
Dates.
Failure classifications.
And halfway down the page, a sentence that made his knees feel weak.
**Critical oxygen-delivery fault
reproduced during controlled testing forty-eight hours before patient incident.**
Ethan read it again.
Then again.
His eyes filled.
“They knew.”
Victoria said nothing.
“They knew before Rachel was transported.”
“Yes.”
“And they used it anyway.”
Victoria’s voice broke slightly.
“Yes.”
Ethan looked up.
