By Thursday afternoon, the suspension had become termination, conduct inconsistent with the terms of employment, failure to disclose a prior relationship during the hiring process. He was escorted out of the building by HR, which was professional and quiet and impersonal in the way that formal processes are designed to be. Alana was suspended the same afternoon. The board had called an emergency session for the following week. Dorian got home before Nia.
He sat at the kitchen table and didn't do anything for a while. Then he started packing up his camera equipment because it needed to be inventoried and it gave his hands something to do. Nia came home from school and found him on the floor with the cases open. She looked at the cases and then at his face and then she went to her room and came back with her backpack which she set next to his cases. She didn't say why.
He hadn't heard her on the phone with her aunt, but he understood that she knew. "We might need to move," he said. She nodded once. She sat down on the floor next to him and started organizing lens caps which he had already organized but which she reorganized anyway because she needed to do something with her hands, too. After a few minutes, she said without looking up, "You always told me that real pictures save time.
They can't lie about when they were taken. Dorian's hands stopped. He looked at his daughter. She was looking at the lens caps. He reached across her and opened his laptop.
He pulled up the photographs Roland had distributed to the board. The images of him leaving Alana's apartment. The ones with the visible clock. He opened the file metadata. He read the timestamp, the device signature, the export chain.
Then he opened the emails, the fabricated thread, and looked at the digital signature embedded in the header data of each message. He sat back. The photographs had been captured on a date that was 12 days after the one shown on the hallway clock. The clock had been set back. The file metadata hadn't been.
The emails carried a signature certificate that had been generated 4 days after his termination, meaning the account used to create them had been accessed after he no longer worked at the company. This wasn't intuition. This wasn't luck. This was technical evidence, the kind that left no interpretive room, and it was sitting in publicly accessible file headers that no one had bothered to check because no one expected the person they were trying to remove to know how to read them. Dorian looked at his daughter.
"You're right." he said. "They can't." Nia looked up at him. He was already reaching for his phone. The board meeting was in 4 days. The board meeting was scheduled for 10:00 in the morning in the glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor.
Dorian knew the room. He had presented in it twice. He knew which chairs faced the window and which faced the wall and where the light fell at that hour because he noticed those things automatically the way he noticed everything that had to do with how a space was arranged and what it was designed to make people feel. He stood on the sidewalk outside the building at 9:47 with Nia beside him. He had not planned to bring her.
She had been ready when he came out of his room in the suit he'd worn to the interview, and she had looked at him in the way that made it clear she already understood where he was going and had decided she was coming, and he had not had a strong enough argument against it. She was wearing her school clothes. She had her backpack. The masking tape on the strap was still there. "You don't have to come up," he said.
"I know." "It might take a while." "I know." He looked at the building entrance. Through the lobby glass, he could see the security desk, the elevator bank, the particular quality of light that large corporate buildings manufacture to make you feel simultaneously welcomed and insignificant. "If I go in there," he said, "it puts you back in the middle of it." Nia looked up at him. She had her mother's eyes, not the color, but the quality of them, the way they settled on something and stayed. "Dad," she said, "I don't need a nice apartment.
I don't need you to have a big title." She paused. "I just need you to not let them make the lie true." Dorian looked at his daughter for a long moment. Then he took her hand and walked through the door. He had called Gerald Fitch's office the evening before and spoken to his assistant, a measured woman named Carol, who had listened to his request without interruption and told him she would pass the message along. Fitch had called back 40 minutes later and said without elaboration that he could be present at the start of the session.
That was all the opening Dorian had asked for. He left Nia with the lobby security officer, a woman named Darlene, who had waved to Nia on the Saturdays Dorian had brought her to the building. Darlene told Nia she had a granddaughter the same age and produced a deck of cards from somewhere under the desk. Dorian took the elevator to the 14th floor. The doors opened onto a hallway that had three people in it.
Two attorneys he didn't recognize and a member of Roland's team who saw Dorian step off the elevator and went very still for half a second before picking up her phone. Dorian walked to the conference room door and opened it. There were seven board members seated at the long table. Roland was at the far end standing with the ease of someone who had arranged the furniture. Alana was at the near end alone on her side of the table with a legal pad in front of her that she appeared to have stopped writing on some time ago.