Outside the company, employees faced another kind of pressure. Recruiters began calling experienced engineers with offers from competitors, and news reports speculated that the hospital program had been permanently damaged. Several major customers requested assurances that deliveries and maintenance would continue. Dante joined those conversations with technical staff who knew the systems, refusing to let lawyers make promises engineers could not support.
A hospital network administrator asked whether Mercer Meridian would still stand behind equipment installed years earlier. She explained that rural medical facilities could not postpone care while a supplier settled a boardroom dispute. Dante told her that existing safety and maintenance obligations would be honored and described the independent assessment underway for delayed expansions. He did not blame Blackridge or Oliver for every problem, because the administrator needed a reliable schedule rather than an explanation of corporate betrayal.
As the week progressed, outside counsel delivered a preservation package to the appropriate regulators and enforcement agencies. Its contents included transaction records, disputed approval logs, valuation differences, and evidence of potentially improper related-party benefits. The investigators understood that civil and criminal questions would need to be considered separately, with different standards of proof and different consequences. Dante asked for no special treatment beyond a thorough examination of the records.
Oliver's lawyers sent another public statement claiming the allegations were a pretext for rejecting a transaction that would have enriched shareholders. The statement was followed by a sudden wave of comments online portraying Dante as a man who had returned from retirement to play the hero while other people suffered financially. Employees read those attacks while worrying about payroll and contracts, and some began to question whether any side was telling the whole truth. Dante took that doubt seriously because it came from people whose faith had been mishandled too often.
He met with the employee representatives and walked them through the confirmed facts without exposing confidential witness material. The Blackridge signing had been halted, the independent investigation was active, verified supplier debts were being addressed, and the most urgent research projects had provisional funding. He told them the company might still face losses or litigation and that no credible leader could promise otherwise. What he could offer was an open account of what the company knew and an honest explanation when the answer was still uncertain.
One employee asked whether Dante intended to leave again when the crisis passed. The question unsettled him because he recognized how much resentment his absence had created, even among people who understood why he had gone. He said he would establish a leadership structure that did not depend on his presence every hour, and that he would remain actively accountable while the work was underway. He was not promising to abandon the role of father; he was refusing to let his family become an excuse for never checking what happened to the company that carried their name.
Later that night, Calista found him looking at Henry's photograph outside a renovated laboratory. She asked whether the founder's protections had been Henry's idea. Dante told her Henry had wanted the company to be difficult to buy for the wrong reasons, and Rosalind had insisted that the mission be written in language clear enough for a court to understand. Calista said that the documents had probably saved the company, but Dante shook his head.