And for a long time, they had. In the middle of that grueling investigation, Nolan received an offer from a rival aviation company, one with a stable reputation and none of the wreckage currently surrounding Veil Meridian. Ardan did not ask him to turn it down. She told him only that the company needed a man like him, but that his daughter needed a father who was not constantly sacrificing himself for people who had shown him so little in return. Nolan heard something in her voice that surprised him.
A recognition that had nothing to do with contracts or job titles, and understood for the first time that Ardan Vale was beginning to see the man standing in front of her rather than the uniform he wore. Later that week, when his car broke down outside the hanger, Ardan drove him home herself, and a photographer working for a gossip outlet caught an image of her standing outside his front door late in the evening. By morning, the photograph had spread across local news sites beneath a headline implying an inappropriate relationship between the chief executive and a technician currently under internal investigation. Sebastian moved immediately, calling an emergency session of the board and arguing that Ardan had allowed personal feelings to compromise her judgment, demanding that Nolan be suspended without further discussion. Ardan refused to disclose evidence that had not yet been formally verified by outside safety investigators, a caution that only fed suspicion among board members already uneasy about the photograph.
Sebastian then produced an edited access log appearing to show Nolan entering restricted storage areas at unusual hours on multiple occasions. Further evidence, he claimed of a man who could not be trusted near sensitive company property. Nolan knew immediately the records had been altered, but with no way to prove it in the moment. He could only watch as the board voted to suspend Ardan from her role as chief executive, pending a full internal review, elevating Sebastian to acting director in her place. Before Ardan left the boardroom, Sebastian leaned close and told Nolan quietly that men like him needed to remember their place inside a company like this one.
Nolan replied that Sebastian had just made his gravest mistake yet, handing an unemployed technician the freedom to investigate without any obligation left to protect the company's reputation. Within hours of taking control, Sebastian ordered every piece of historical maintenance data wiped from the company servers, framing it publicly as a routine system upgrade scheduled to complete within 12 hours. Ardan lost her badge access to the building the moment the board's decision took effect and Nolan's temporary consulting credentials were revoked alongside hers. Camille, risking her own position, told them about an old backup tablet still kept in a corner of the hanger, one that stored an offline copy of maintenance logs and would automatically sync and erase itself the moment the server upgrade finished running. Everett used his authority as a licensed pilot to grant Nolan access to the technical bay through entirely legitimate channels, carefully avoiding anything that might later be characterized as unauthorized entry.
Grant discovered them searching the archives and attempted to seal off the hanger under the pretense of a security inspection, but Nolan managed to copy the entire offline log before the system purge reached that final backup. The recovered data proved conclusively that Grant had used an administrative account to alter Nolan's overnight work records and disguise the true origin of the counterfeit components running through the supply chain. Buried within the same files, however, was a discovery far more devastating than either of them expected. Evidence that the very first contract with the counterfeit parts intermediary had been signed years earlier. during the final months of Ardan's father's leadership of the company. If made public, Sebastian could easily twist that fact into proof that the Vale family had known about compromised safety practices for years and chosen silence over disclosure.