The aircraft she had nearly boarded that morning had been trying to tell someone the truth for weeks. And every time, the warning had been quietly buried before anyone outside the hangar ever heard it.
Connor understood that exposure was only a matter of time now, and he shifted his strategy from defense to attack. He began quietly working to discredit Lucas before the investigation could reach any formal conclusion.
An internal email, carefully worded and conveniently leaked to several board members, painted Lucas as a disgruntled contractor manipulating a distracted CEO in hopes of securing a permanent position he had never earned. The email made sure to highlight the million-dollar offer Grace had made in the heat of the moment, stripped of any context. Rumors moved through the company quickly; some employees began repeating the idea that Lucas had manufactured a crisis simply to collect a payout he had cleverly pretended to refuse.
Within days, Lucas found his access to the hangar suspended pending review. Grace was formally asked by the board to remove him from the investigation entirely. One board member told her bluntly that she was placing a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of a mechanic. Grace answered without hesitation that she was placing it in the hands of evidence, not job titles.
Despite her defense, the decision to bar Lucas from the facility stood. He did not fight it.
Before leaving, he handed Grace a single printed record: a timeline of every prior warning on her aircraft alongside the corresponding work order numbers. His only advice was simple: "Do not start by looking for who is guilty," he told her. "Start by looking for what keeps repeating."
Grace stayed behind with Jason, working late into the evening. Together, they traced every irregular record back to a single point of origin: a subcontractor whose work kept appearing beside the falsified entries. Every contract with that vendor carried Connor's signature at the bottom.
Grace ordered his system access revoked immediately, but Connor had already anticipated the move: within the hour, he submitted his resignation and left the building before anyone could formally confront him.