Douglas Hale did not send the documentation the moment he had it. He walked it up himself, because there were things a man needed to say out loud that he did not trust to an email thread, and at four-eleven that afternoon he stood in the doorway of the thirty-first floor conference room with a manila folder under his arm like something from an earlier decade of the company, when information still had weight you could carry."Close the door," he said.Ethan closed it.Douglas laid three sheets on the table, each one a printout of an access log, timestamps down the left margin in a font too small for the significance of what it recorded. "The regulatory filing against me traced back to a shell entity two layers removed from Marsh Capital, exactly as I expected. That part isn't new. What's new is this." He tapped the second sheet. "Someone inside this building used an administrative override to pull my personnel file eleven days before the filing was submitted. Full compensation history,

Nora Cole ran point on the Foster Lin fallout before Ethan had finished asking anyone to run point on anything, and she did it with the brisk, efficient competence that had kept the Harmon Group's daily operations steady for two years, coordinating with Adaeze's team, drafting the internal memo explaining Lin's departure in terms vague enough to protect the investigation and specific enough to satisfy the staff's curiosity, handling the HR logistics with a thoroughness that made Ethan, watching her work from across the executive floor that Thursday, feel something close to gratitude sharp enough to be uncomfortable."You didn't have to take all this on," he told her, finding her at her desk past seven that evening, a stack of finalized documents squared in front of her with the precision of someone who could not stand disorder in a crisis."Somebody had to," she said, not looking up. "You're dealing with Douglas and the board fallout. I'm dealing with the parts that don't require your