And when she finally spoke, her voice was steadier than it had been the night before, though her eyes were not. Darius," she said, "who is your father really?" He looked at the photograph for a long moment before answering. And when he did, there was no surprise in his expression. Only the weariness of a man who had waited years for someone to finally ask the right question. "I thought you would ask me that sooner," he told her.
Vivien asked him to explain himself and Darius said that his father had once been one of the men who built the earliest version of the technology that Armmitage Holdings still relied on today. He was not the only one. Darius added, "There had been two of them working side by side on something that would eventually be worth more than either man could have imagined. One of those men was Elias Witmore. The other was Marcus Ashcroft." Viven felt the floor tilt slightly beneath her.
She told him it was impossible that her father had built the company from nothing, that there had never been a partner, silent or otherwise, in any version of the story she had grown up believing. Darius did not argue with her memory. He only told her what he knew, which was that after the two men finished their work together, the rights to what they had built vanished from any paperwork bearing his father's name, that Marcus Ashcraftoft rose to become chief executive within the year, and that Elias Whitmore disappeared from the company entirely, leaving behind a wife and a young son with nothing but a name that meant nothing to anyone who mattered. Viven asked carefully whether he was accusing her father of stealing his father's work. Darius told her that he had not said that.
She pressed him, asking what exactly he was saying, if not that, and Darius answered slowly, as though each word had a weight he needed to measure before releasing it. He said that his father had vanished. shortly after discovering that someone close to him had betrayed him and that he had spent years trying to determine whether that someone was the man in the photograph or someone standing just outside its frame. Before Viven could respond, Darius reached into his jacket and produced a small battered flash drive, its plastic casing scratched from years in a pocket it was never meant to leave. He set it on the desk between them beside the photograph and told her that this was the real reason he had taken a job in the maintenance department of a company he could have avoided entirely. He had not come to sabotage anything.