He had come to understand what had happened to his father. One quiet year at a time, and the answer, he said, might be waiting inside the data on that drive. Viven spent the rest of that day pretending to run her company while her mind circled endlessly around the device sitting in her top drawer. She sat through a budget meeting without absorbing a single figure, nodded through a call with an investor whose name she would not have been able to repeat 5 minutes later and twice caught her assistant studying her with quiet concern before she waved the concern away with a tired smile. Every time she closed her eyes for even a moment, she saw the faded photograph again.
Her father's younger face standing beside a man. History had apparently tried to erase, and she understood somewhere beneath the discipline she had spent her whole career cultivating that her carefully ordered version of her own family was about to come apart. That evening, after the floor had emptied and the cleaning crews had not yet begun their rounds, she asked Darius to meet her in a small conference room on the 41st floor, one rarely used because its windows faced an alley instead of the skyline, chosen precisely because no one would think to look for either of them there. Darius arrived first, sitting alone in the dim room with the flash drive resting on the table in front of him, turning it slowly between his fingers, the way a man turns over a decision he has already made, but has not yet found the courage to speak aloud. When Viven stepped inside and closed the door behind her, neither of them said much at all.
There was an unspoken understanding that the moment called for action rather than conversation, and Viven set her laptop on the table, a machine she had bought with her own money years earlier, specifically because it had never once connected to the corporate network, and therefore left no trail anyone inside the building could follow. They connected the drive to the laptop, and for nearly 2 hours, neither of them spoke as file after file loaded onto the screen between them. The data unspooled in fragments at first, corrupted headers and partial spreadsheets that required patience to reconstruct, and Darius found himself grateful for the years he had spent quietly teaching himself the kind of technical literacy that had nothing to do with his job title. Viven, for her part, recognized certain formatting conventions from documents she had seen in her father's private files after his death, conventions long since abandoned by the company, but unmistakable to anyone who had spent childhood afternoons in his home office. Slowly, methodically, the two of them began assembling a timeline neither of them had wanted to find.
Each new file adding weight to a version of history that bore only a passing resemblance to the one either of them had grown up believing. The data was old, formatted in a way that suggested it had not been touched in three decades, but the numbers were unmistakable. A significant sum of money had been transferred out of an early Armmitage account to a shell company that existed on paper for exactly 11 months before dissolving without explanation. The approval signature belonged to Marcus Ashccraftoft. Viven had expected that much, bracing herself for the confirmation of her worst assumption about her father.