After Evelyn left, Mason stood alone in the quiet garage, staring down at his old toolbox, the memories rising unbidden, the sound of an alarm he could still hear if he let himself, a forged signature, and a man who had turned his back at the exact moment Mason needed the truth defended the most. He thought of the years that followed, the doors that closed, the work that dried up once his name became attached to a failure that was never his. He closed the toolbox slowly, the metal latch clicking shut with a finality that matched the decision settling inside him. He did not throw Evelyn's card away, though, and he did not call the number printed on it either. He left it sitting on the edge of the workbench, neither accepted nor discarded, a small unfinished thread hanging between the life he had built for himself and the one that had once tried to destroy him completely.
Logan understood immediately that Amelia was digging into Mason's past, and he wasted no time acting on that fear. He summoned Carter into his office and instructed him to scrub every positive note from the interview record, leaving behind only the phrase unprofessional, not a fit, as though that single line could erase everything David had quietly observed in that room. Carter agreed without much resistance, eager to protect his own position, though even he could not understand why a man as composed as Logan would grow so tense over a broke mechanic with no real leverage. Logan placed a call to a contact in the legal department, asking him to pull whatever remained of the old Phoenix project files and quietly prepare measures to keep Mason away from the test floor if he ever set foot in the building again. He feared that if Mason got anywhere near the L9 prototype, he would recognize immediately that the current failure was simply an echo of the same design flaw from a decade earlier.
One Logan had spent years making sure nobody would ever trace back to him. Meanwhile, Amelia quietly asked Evelyn to compare the signature on the old Phoenix incident report with anything they had on file for Mason today. Evelyn discovered something troubling almost immediately. A clear inconsistency between the signature that had once confessed to the original fault and the handwriting found on Mason's recent job application. David, working separately, returned to the archived technical records and found that several critical pages from the original investigation had been deleted from the internal system entirely, as though someone had gone to great lengths to make sure the truth could never resurface.
Amelia began assembling the pieces in her mind, slowly understanding that her father had not been confused in his final months at all, that his warning about Mason Reed had been a deliberate attempt to protect a man who had been wrongly blamed for something he never did. Logan called an emergency meeting and proposed publicly announcing that the L9 failure had originated with an outside parts supplier, a story designed to buy time. While quietly delaying the inevitable reckoning, Amelia refused outright, telling him plainly that the company could not keep building its future on reports built from lies. Logan's tone turned cold in response, reminding her that the board held the power to replace a chief executive if she allowed a flagship program to collapse under her watch. The room grew tense as Amelia realized she was no longer fighting a single engine failure, but an entire culture of concealment that had been quietly woven into the fabric of her own family's company for years without her ever noticing it.