Charlotte had known Thomas Hail only as a quiet senior engineer who left the company shortly after the scandal. He had later established a consulting business that acquired several lucrative foreign contracts. Richard had dismissed questions about those contracts as ordinary competition. Thomas died six years before the present day, leaving Marcus a small house, a handful of debts, and several boxes of papers he had never finished sorting.
"Would you let our investigators review those papers?" Charlotte asked.
Marcus's expression hardened. "Are you asking as my employer or as somebody whose father used mine?"
"I'm asking as a person who wants to find out what happened. But you're right to distinguish those roles. An independent team will make the request, and you'll have counsel if you want it."
He nodded slowly. Charlotte saw the difference a careful answer made. She had spent years believing leadership required her to move faster than everyone else, making decisions before doubt could slow her. Evan had arrived carrying the kind of doubt her company treated as weakness, and in two days that doubt had exposed more than six months of expensive certainty.
At work, Evan found the mood of the prototype division changing around him. The black performance car remained behind the glass barrier, its diagnostic cables disconnected and its wheels secured. Security personnel had begun checking access cards at doors that used to remain open. Engineers spoke in low voices beside the coffee machine, and Nadia explained that an outside review had been ordered.
"Is somebody accusing you of messing with that connector?" Evan asked.
"Not directly," she said. "But when a component appears in a build and nobody admits putting it there, everybody who touched the car becomes part of the paperwork."
"That makes sense."
"You don't sound insulted."
"I spent a lot of years working in shops where people got blamed because the owner wanted somebody to blame. I'd rather answer questions than watch somebody make up answers."
Nadia glanced at him. "Your father?"
Evan looked at the vehicle behind the glass. "You heard about that already?"
"Somebody searched your last name in the old company newsletter database. People started talking. For what it's worth, I don't think fathers and sons owe each other explanations for things the sons didn't do."
He thanked her, then returned to his task list. He repaired a failing lift sensor, rebuilt a cooling pump from a service fleet, and helped a technician distinguish a software warning from a damaged pressure transducer. The work steadied him. Machines had a way of remaining indifferent to family history, and he needed that indifference while the rest of his world threatened to turn into questions.
During lunch, Evan took his sandwich to a small courtyard behind the plant. An older man in a blue maintenance jacket sat on the other end of the bench, eating soup from a thermos. His name patch read RAYMOND. When Evan introduced himself, the man looked up sharply.
"Carter?" Raymond asked. "You one of Daniel's people?"
"His son."