“Maybe not from this,” she said.
“But someone sent it.”
Ethan looked at the strange address.
“Forward it to me.
Do not delete anything.”
Mia did.
Dylan stood again.
This time nobody stopped him.
He left the Polaris Room without saying goodbye.
The deal did not survive the night.
At least not in its original form.
Renata told Ethan the consortium could not continue until every material communication translated by Dylan had been independently reviewed.
Ethan agreed before she finished the sentence.
The representatives left without shaking hands.
An eighty-million-dollar agreement that had been hours from final approval was frozen.
Mia remained behind because she still had a job to do.
She gathered untouched plates.
Straightened glasses.
Folded a napkin that did not need folding.
Ethan watched her for a moment.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Actually, I do.
Samantha will ask why Polaris wasn’t reset.”
It was the first thing that almost made him smile.
Almost.
Then he looked down at Mia’s old employee record on his laptop.
“I signed this.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember your case.”
That hurt more than an apology would have helped.
Mia nodded.
“There were probably a lot of names on your desk.
Mine was only important to me.”
Ethan closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them, he did not try to defend himself.
“That isn’t an excuse.”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you sue?”
Mia touched the pendant at her collarbone.
“My father got sick three weeks after I lost the job.
By the time he died, I didn’t have money for a fight.
I needed rent more than vindication.”
Ethan looked toward the service door Dylan had disappeared through.
“And tonight you warned me anyway.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“Why did you?”
Mia thought about her father’s bridge sketch.
A structure’s integrity depended on its smallest joint.
“Because being wronged by someone doesn’t make it right to watch them walk into a trap.”
The investigation began the next morning.
Cross Harbor preserved Dylan’s emails, translation logs, invoices and access history.
The consortium performed its own review.
Northstar provided the reservation records showing that the request for a particularly discreet server had been submitted through Dylan’s side of the booking communications.
The anonymous message required more work.
Its address had been routed through a disposable service, but metadata preserved in Cross Harbor’s systems connected earlier test messages from the same account to a device Dylan had used while logged into the company’s guest network.
It was not enough by itself to prove every accusation.
