Marcus stood beside the workstation, reading a copy of the component trace. "That would have delayed validation for weeks."
"Possibly longer," Priya said. "And the delay would have been blamed on the engineering team. We need to find out who had access, who benefited, and whether somebody modified the data itself."
Evan frowned. "Could the faulty connector have been meant to point toward my father's old division?"
Priya considered the question before answering. "If the obsolete code was intentionally added, yes. But intention is a conclusion, not a starting point. We'll follow the chain of evidence."
Charlotte was present for only the first ten minutes. She agreed to provide the requested documents, then left the workshop in Priya's control. Evan noticed that she did not ask the auditor to keep him out of the investigation. That small act of restraint did more to earn his respect than any promise Charlotte had made.
Late that evening Helen Cho called Charlotte with another piece of information. A former board secretary, now living in Vermont, remembered a dispute over the ownership of Daniel's designs and a closed meeting where Richard Bennett ordered the project files sealed. She remembered a phrase from the minutes: special archive below original test facility. Charlotte looked at the enlarged photograph on her desk, the indistinct silver key in Daniel's hand, and felt a slow certainty taking shape.
The old engineering room was real. Somebody had wanted its records protected from the ordinary archives, and Daniel had possessed a key. If the company could no longer find the truth in its official files, perhaps the truth had been waiting all along behind the locked door her father refused to show her.
Charlotte called Evan the following afternoon, just as he finished inspecting a returned fleet vehicle. He listened while she explained the discovery of the old archive reference and the location of the original Bennett facility. When she asked whether his father had left anything that might relate to it, he looked instinctively toward the toolbox beneath his bench. There were things he had kept for years without understanding, and he was no longer certain he wanted the woman on the telephone to see them.
"Maybe," he said. "But if I have something, it belongs to my family until I decide otherwise."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
Charlotte allowed the question to stand. "I'm beginning to. Evan, I don't want to walk into your father's past and take possession of it just because my name is on the building. If we find records, we'll have them copied and independently reviewed. You can have counsel of your own."
He glanced at the other mechanics, who were pretending not to hear the conversation. "I have a daughter to pick up. I'm not spending another night at headquarters."
"Then don't. I'll come to you if you're comfortable with that."
Evan almost refused. A billionaire arriving at his apartment would turn the neighborhood into a curiosity, and he did not enjoy the idea of Charlotte seeing how closely they lived to losing everything. But he remembered the photograph Lily had moved and the empty envelope addressed to him. His father had asked him to wait until he was old enough. Perhaps he had been old enough for years and simply too afraid to discover what the papers contained.