Regardless of how much money Blackthorne eventually threw at the problem, forced to confront the scale of what had actually happened, Vivien demanded that Dorian walk her through the entire contract in detail, something she admitted reluctantly that she had never bothered to read closely herself. Buried within dozens of pages, they found a lengthy technical appendix Dorian had apparently skimmed without absorbing its significance. The repair method Rowan had used was not a standard off-the-shelf procedure available from any qualified shop. He had designed an entirely new reinforcement structure specifically to save the aircraft from being scrapped outright. And the appendix detailing that structure came with strict conditions attached.
It specified revised load limits for the airframe, a customized maintenance schedule unique to the repair, updated pressurization tolerances, mandatory inspection points tied to specific flight hours, verification data that only Rowan's team possessed, and complete traceability records for every replaced component. Without any single piece of that documentation, no professional pilot, insurance provider, or operator would ever certify the aircraft for use, no matter how polished its exterior appeared. It was during this same stretch of frantic phone calls that Mara quietly revealed something about Rowan's past to the wider management team, information she had pieced together from the drawings she had seen pinned to his office wall months earlier. Rowan had once served as lead structural engineer on a major aircraft manufacturing program responsible for developing repair techniques that facilities across the industry still relied on today. He had left that high-paying position after his wife passed away, choosing instead to build a small independent practice where he could remain closely involved in raising his daughter.
Many of the very repair standards larger shops now used as a baseline had originated from his own engineering work years earlier. He had not opened Hail Arrow Restoration because he lacked ambition or skill, but because he refused to return to an environment where sales targets consistently outweighed the judgment of the engineers responsible for keeping people safe. Vivien had mistaken his quiet, unassuming manner for weakness from the very first afternoon they met, and that miscalculation was now costing her far more than money. Rowan had never set out to build a case against anyone. He simply kept the same habits he had followed his entire career, documenting every decision, as though someone might one day need to understand exactly why a particular choice had been made.
His technicians teased him occasionally about the thickness of his project binders, joking that he treated routine maintenance logs like courtroom exhibits. That habit, dismissed for years as mere caution, suddenly became the only thing standing between Hail Arrow Restoration and a company willing to rewrite history in its own favor. When his attorney reviewed the files Rowan handed over, she told him plainly that she had rarely seen a small contractor keep records this complete, and that the discipline would likely save him months of drawn out litigation. Evidence against Dorian continued to mount as well, particularly once Thaddius Kingsley, the chairman of Blackthorne's board, learned that the company's flagship aircraft could not legally leave the ground. He ordered an immediate review of the entire repair project, demanding full transparency from both Vivien and Dorian regarding how the situation had spiraled this far out of control.