And it turned out the most broken part of the evening had never been sitting inside the engine at all. Once the truth was laid bare before the entire board, Evelyn moved quickly to suspend Grant's system access and forward every piece of recovered evidence directly to the legal department. Yet, the immediate crisis was far from resolved since she still needed to reach Seattle before the deadline expired in only a few remaining hours. Nolan explained that the aircraft could still fly once the false lockout was removed, the mismatched module properly replaced, and a final pressure test completed to confirm everything met safety standards. The backup maintenance crew finally arrived, but they hesitated visibly in front of a system that had clearly been tampered with, forcing Nolan to guide them through the repair procedure step-by-step himself.
Evelyn stood beside him now, no longer barking orders the way she had at the beginning of the night, quietly asking what he needed from her instead. Nolan answered dryly that he needed silence and a better flashlight than the one currently dying in his hand, a small joke that eased the tension in the hangar just enough for everyone to breathe. Evelyn ended up holding the flashlight herself while Nolan worked beneath the auxiliary panel, an image that would have seemed impossible only hours earlier, a billionaire executive crouched beside the very mechanic she had initially dismissed without a second glance. Her knees ached against the cold concrete floor. Her expensive coat was now streaked faintly with grease.
And yet she found she did not mind nearly as much as she expected to. There was something oddly grounding about the work itself. There was the smell of metal and oil, the low hum of instruments slowly coming back online, and the simple physical proof that a problem could be solved with steady hands and enough patience rather than money alone. She watched Nolan's fingers move with practiced certainty through wires and connectors. And she thought, not for the first time that night, that she had spent her entire career surrounded by people who could talk about solutions far more easily than they could actually produce one.
When the aircraft systems finally powered back on and every indicator turned green across the board, a wave of quiet relief moved through the hangar. Evelyn remembered the promise she had made at the very start of the night and told him softly