“He used to take me here on Saturdays when I was a kid,” she said. “I’d sit in the cabin and pretend we were going somewhere better than a hangar in the rain.”
“Did you?”
“Sometimes. Mostly we went to meetings where I had to sit quietly and color in the margins of his legal pads.”
Evan smiled faintly.
“He trusted machines more than people,” she said. “But when he trusted a person, he never forgot why.”
Evan thought of the photograph, of Conrad’s arm around a younger Vivien.
“Did he trust Miles?”
She did not answer right away.
“That is the question I am starting to ask.”
By morning, every Vanguard Aerosupply file had been deleted from the company maintenance server.
Lena discovered it at 6:40 and called Evan before he got through the hangar door.
“They wiped it.”
“Everything?”
“Vanguard folder. Purchase orders. Installation reports. Vendor history. Gone from the live server.”
“Backup?”
Her voice changed, just enough to make him breathe again.
“I cloned it yesterday.”
“Of course you did.”
“I like to be emotionally prepared for nonsense.”
Evan stood in the rain outside Hangar Seven and looked toward the building lights.
“Print everything,” he said. “Twice.”
“Already started.”
Three days before the scheduled departure, the altered contract appeared.
Miles sent it by email with a note saying legal had confirmed the deadline was binding and failure to deliver by Friday allowed Ashcroft Meridian to withhold final payment. Evan opened the attachment, read the penalty clause, then opened his own archived copy of the contract.
The original listed Friday as a target delivery date, subject to inspection findings.
The new version made it binding.
His initials appeared beside the revision.
They were not his initials.
Evan sat alone in the Rourke Airworks office at midnight with both documents open on the desk. The old heater clicked in the corner. Norah had left a paper plate covered in foil beside his keyboard. Turkey sandwich. Pickles. An apple. A sticky note on top.
Eat this or I’m calling Lena.
He smiled despite everything, ate half the sandwich cold, and scanned both contracts into the evidence folder.
The final two weeks of work did not look dramatic.
Bench calibrations. Pressure tests. Control surface checks. Continuity inspections. Software updates. Replacing what could be replaced, tracing what could not, verifying every redundant channel. It was slow, unglamorous work. The kind of work people only noticed when someone skipped it.
The morning the engines turned over for the first time, the sound moved through the hangar floor and up into Evan’s bones.
Aaron stopped what he was doing.
Martin looked up from the checklist.
Lena allowed herself one long breath, then marked the test result.
Vivien arrived while the auxiliary power unit was still running. She stood at the hangar entrance for several seconds before walking in, one hand pressed lightly against the lower fuselage as she passed.
Evan recognized the gesture.
People touch what they are afraid to lose.
“She sounds good,” Vivien said.
“She’s getting there.”
“Getting there?”
“Final verification isn’t complete.”
Miles, who had arrived behind her, made a visible effort not to react.
“We’re scheduled for wheels up tomorrow,” he said.
“No,” Evan answered.
Vivien turned.
“What remains?”
“Independent traceability confirmation on flight-critical components, final control response verification, and a clean airworthiness signoff.”