The auditors requested email archives.
The relevant message appeared within the hour.
September.
Preston to Grant:
There is a risk that using the Becket certificates against payroll obligations could create wage-compliance exposure, particularly given the expiration terms and original promotional-use restriction. I recommend legal review before implementation.
Grant’s reply contained eleven words.
Use it anyway. We need the quarter clean. Legal can follow.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
The senior auditor printed the email.
Grant stared at Preston.
“You saved that?”
“It was company email.”
The answer nearly made Evan’s point for him, though Evan was not in the building.
Records existed.
That afternoon, the audit firm notified Blackidge’s board audit committee.
Outside counsel became involved.
The Indiana medical-device manufacturer learned of the issue through transaction confirmation procedures.
Its counsel paused execution of the $42 million supply agreement.
The regional bank reviewing Blackidge’s expanded credit facility froze approval.
No one canceled anything yet.
But everything stopped moving.
Grant blamed Evan.
He said so in the emergency board meeting.
“A disgruntled technician has turned an internal payroll dispute into a commercial crisis.”
The board chair, Margaret Sloan, was sixty-three and had spent twenty-eight years in industrial manufacturing before joining Blackidge’s board.
She asked:
“Did the technician create the certificates?”
“No.”
“Did he expire them?”
“No.”
“Did he enter them at face value?”
“No.”
“Did he transfer the retention reserve?”
Grant stopped.
Margaret looked at him.
“Then perhaps we should be precise about what caused the crisis.”
Evan remained suspended while all of this unfolded.
The company continued paying his base salary temporarily because Dana refused to process termination without written legal approval.
That decision saved Blackidge from making its situation worse.
Dana slept poorly for most of January.
She had known.
Not everything.
Enough.
In November, when Preston first circulated the idea internally, Dana had objected.
She wrote that replacing earned cash wages with third-party certificates presented “obvious employee-relations and potential compliance concerns.”
Grant responded verbally.