The lawyer asked whether she had read Ethan's recommendation before approving the summary sent to Clare. Vanessa said she had reviewed it in context. The lawyer requested that she identify the context that justified omitting the instruction not to certify. Vanessa looked toward the closed door and asked whether this interview was disciplinary.
Across the building, Richard opened the old partnership file again. He had never intended to use Ethan's early status to override his daughter's judgment, and he had spent years encouraging Clare to make decisions without asking for his approval. But he recognized that his silence about the founding agreement had prevented her from understanding the importance of a technical attestation requirement. The mistake belonged to him as surely as the missing report belonged to Vanessa.
He called Ethan that afternoon. They spoke for the first time in months without another person listening, and the familiar voice on the line made Richard briefly remember a younger man drinking terrible coffee beside a prototype that refused to start. He said he was sorry he had allowed the company to become a place where Ethan's warnings could be dismissed. Ethan did not make the apology easy by assuring him that the past could be repaired with one conversation.
"You kept the private part of our promise," Ethan said. "You forgot the part about building a company that listened to people who were telling the truth." Richard leaned back in his chair. He asked whether Ethan regretted coming back as a technician instead of remaining outside Northstar entirely.
Ethan thought of the coworkers who had asked for help with ordinary problems and the young engineer who had remained brave enough to preserve the version history. "No," he said. "I learned things I never would have learned from the executive floor." Richard asked whether that knowledge included the ways in which he, as chairman, had failed the people who worked there. Ethan answered that it did.
The two men spoke about Ethan's wife and the years he had spent raising Lily. Richard remembered attending a small birthday party when Lily was still a toddler, watching Ethan patiently clean frosting from a tiny face while pretending not to notice his friends discussing a business expansion in the next room. He had envied the clarity of Ethan's priorities without understanding what it had cost to choose them. Now he wondered why he had spent so long assuming that protecting the company's reputation meant protecting its leadership from uncomfortable facts.
"The federal team may insist on seeing you," Richard said. Ethan answered that he would speak honestly to any qualified reviewer, but he would not validate an unsafe system. Richard promised not to ask him to. There was a silence before Ethan said, "Then let's find out whether that promise holds when the board is angry."
At home, Lily practiced for her science fair with an audience made up of three stuffed animals and her father. She gave the rabbit the hardest questions because it had the most serious expression. Ethan smiled while she explained how she had learned to distinguish a stable flight from a lucky one. The rehearsal ended with the airplane landing in a laundry basket and Lily declaring the test successful enough to require another try.