Sloan had believed in him once, in the early years, before the weight of unpaid bills began to erode whatever patience she had for a dream that refused to pay rent on time. It was Conrad Blackthorn who first pulled her into his orbit, offering her a taste of private jets, luxury hotels, and rooms filled with people who spoke in numbers with more zeros than she had ever imagined for herself. Long before any of that, Blackthorn had approached Grant directly, offering to buy his early technology for a fraction of its worth, on the condition that Grant sign away certain safety verification steps in exchange for lower production costs. Grant refused outright, unwilling to trade verified safety for speed, a decision Sloan at the time considered proof that he cared more about principle than about providing for his family. That single refusal became the fracture point of their marriage, the argument neither of them ever fully recovered from.
She left not long after a failed funding round left them nearly broke, walking away while Piper, only 7 years old, stayed behind with her father because there was simply no other choice to make. Those early years had not been easy on anyone, least of all Piper, who grew up falling asleep to the sound of her father typing at the kitchen table long after her bedtime, surrounded by printouts covered in equations she would not understand until she was old enough to study them herself. Grant remembered those nights clearly, the cold coffee, the space heater that never quite warmed the back room where he worked, and the particular loneliness of building something nobody else believed in yet. He had told himself then that failure was simply data, another input to be studied rather than feared, and he had carried that same steadiness with him ever since. Less than a year later, Grant's prediction system caught a catastrophic failure forming inside a cargo fleet's engine array before it could ever become a headline.
And that single contract became the foundation on which Holloway Meridian was built. He kept his identity quiet, not out of shame or spite, but because he refused to let old headlines about a broken marriage follow his daughter into every classroom and every friendship she tried to build. Back in the present, Grant asked Sloan directly about the signature on the falsified reports, and this time she did not deny it, only insisted she had been following Conrad's explicit instructions. Grant asked whether Conrad had also instructed her to describe 2,400 human beings as an operational burden, and Sloan had no answer for that at all. Desperate, she reached for Piper as a shield, reminding Grant that they had once been a family, and pleading with him not to destroy the career of the mother of his child.
Grant stopped her immediately, refusing to let their daughter be used as leverage, pointing out gently that Sloan had already missed most of the years that mattered by claiming she was always too busy for them. As if summoned by the moment itself, Piper called her father from her dormitory to ask a quick technical question about an engine design assignment, and Grant's voice shifted instantly into something warm and unguarded, entirely unlike the composure he had shown all morning. Sloan heard every word, but said nothing, because Piper had no idea her mother was sitting only a few feet away, listening to a closeness she herself had never managed to build. Piper's question that day had been about torque tolerances, a small technical detail from a homework assignment, and Grant walked her through it patiently, the way he had walked her through countless questions since she was small enough to sit on his lap in the old hangar office. There was no performance in his voice, no awareness that anyone else was listening, only the plain warmth of a father who had never once needed an audience to be present for his child.