Lorraine reached over and squeezed her hand. The city outside went on with its ordinary evening, and Otis let herself sit still for a few minutes without calculating what she ought to do next. Rest, she was learning, was not surrender. It was how a person kept enough strength to return the following morning.
Three weeks into Otis's interim leadership, the auditors delivered a preliminary report that made the conference room feel cold despite the late summer heat. Vanessa Reed had coordinated digital preservation, while a team of forensic accountants examined invoices, contracts, bank confirmations, and board approvals. Jake Wilson attended as a witness to the accounting processes he had used, not as the person expected to pronounce judgment on his former superiors. The report described a pattern of payments that demanded a much fuller explanation than anyone in Ryan's former office had offered.
The consulting vendors had different names but overlapping ownership interests. Two invoices referred to assessments that the receiving departments said they had never requested. A third described equipment-inspection services allegedly performed on a holiday when the relevant production building had been closed. A large portion of the payments had gone to an entity connected through several legal registrations to a business associate of Logan Matthews.
The auditors did not ask Otis to call the arrangement fraud simply because it looked suspicious. They traced transactions, interviewed department heads, and requested underlying deliverables. Some invoices turned out to have legitimate work attached, though the pricing was difficult to justify. Others had no verifiable service records at all. The total exposure was still being calculated, and the independent committee reported the findings to counsel and the appropriate authorities.
"We've got an obligation to pursue recovery," Grace told Otis. "And to find out how our internal controls allowed it."
"Then let's not stop when we find a name we can blame," Otis said. "Every approval that should have caught this needs to be examined. Including anything I signed when I still held that proxy without asking enough questions."
Judith warned her that admitting mistakes publicly could expose the company to litigation. Otis understood. She asked the lawyer to help her distinguish between a factual admission, a guess, and a promise to investigate. She would not lie to make the company look innocent, but she would not casually assign legal responsibility to people without evidence either. Years of engineering had taught her the damage that followed when a confident theory was mistaken for a verified result.
Meanwhile, Ryan had hired a crisis publicist who specialized in making wealthy clients appear persecuted. He began giving interviews about his devotion to his father's company, describing Otis as a former employee manipulated by ambitious advisers. He showed photographs of his childhood in the original workshop and spoke emotionally about Thomas's dream. He omitted the fact that Otis appeared in many of the photographs he had chosen not to display.