Ava looked at me.
“It doesn’t.”
For the first time, she did not defend herself.
She did not blame Julian.
She did not blame her father.
She simply accepted the sentence.
That hurt more than her lies.
“When did the affair begin?” I asked.
Julian looked toward the floor.
Ava answered.
“Fourteen months ago.”
“Was it real?”
She looked at him.
“At first.”
Julian’s jaw tightened.
Ava continued.
“He approached me after a fundraiser. He said he knew about Dad. He said he could help me understand what happened.”
Julian shook his head.
“I believed that too.”
“You were using her?” I asked.
“I was told she had access to you.”
“And did she?”
Ava laughed bitterly.
“I barely knew what Ryan did at work anymore. He stopped telling me anything years ago.”
I remembered the dinners when she asked about my day and I said same as always.
The weekends I spent reviewing reports while she sat alone in the living room.
Neglect did not justify betrayal.
But it explained why someone believed our marriage had enough empty space to hide inside.
“Did you love him?” I asked.
Ava stared at the table.
“I thought I did.”
Julian looked at her, but she did not meet his eyes.
“And me?”
Her answer took longer.
“I loved the version of us I kept waiting for.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t know when I stopped loving you honestly.”
The timer showed thirty-nine minutes.
Brooke moved beside the laptop.
“We can’t decide this based on pain.”
Julian looked at the buttons.
“If we send everything, Ryan becomes the public face of the fraud until investigators verify the evidence.”
“If we delete it,” Brooke said, “the network continues.”
Ava shook her head.
“Delete probably doesn’t mean delete.”
Julian nodded.
“It may only tell them Ryan won’t cooperate.”
I looked at the names on the screen.
Some were probably guilty.
Some were probably trapped.
Some may have been included only to make us panic.
The system was not asking me to expose criminals. It was asking me to trust the person controlling the evidence. That was not justice.
That was recruitment.
“I’m not pressing either button,” I said.
Julian stared at me.
“The timer will decide for you.”
“Then we stop the timer.”
“How?”
I lifted the laptop.
“We destroy the performance.”
Ava shook her head.
“Containment was your first choice. They expected it.”
“Then we do something they didn’t expect.”
I carried the laptop into the garage.
The others followed.
My workbench stood beneath a rack of tools. I placed the machine beside an old radio and removed the bottom screws. Julian watched my hands.
“You’ll trigger something.”
“Everything triggers something.”
Inside, the laptop looked ordinary except for a small black module wired beside the battery.
Brooke pointed.
“What is that?”
“Cellular transmitter,” Julian said.
I disconnected the battery.
The screen stayed on.
A secondary power source kept it alive.
Thirty-one minutes.
I removed the solid-state drive.
The screen flickered, but the timer continued.
The interface was not on the drive.
Julian examined the black module.
“It is streaming from somewhere else.”
“Then the buttons are theater,” I said.
Ava looked at me.