33. Addy
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Addy
By the time I get back to the penthouse, I feel almost human again.
Sophie helped.
She always does, mostly by bullying me with snacks, insulting men with the confidence of a woman who has seen too many bad first dates, and reminding me that my life is only about seventy percent on fire.
The elevator doors open into Ethan’s floor, and I step out with a paper bag tucked against my side because Sophie insisted I take muffins home.
“For the brooding billionaire,” she’d said.
“Ethan isn't brooding.”
She had looked at me for a solid five seconds. “Addy.”
“Fine. He’s slightly brooding.”
“He has sad cheekbones.”
I’d laughed.
Unfortunately, now that phrase is stuck in my head, and as I unlock the door, I’m already wondering whether it would be rude to tell Ethan his cheekbones have emotional trauma.
Probably.
So I’ll save it for later.
The second I step inside, Captain charges at me like I’ve returned from six months at sea instead of one day with a friend.
“Hi, buddy.” I barely manage to set the bag down before he barrels into my legs, tail wagging hard enough to power the Midwest. “Yes, yes, I missed you too. Please don’t injure my uterus.”
I pause. Frown. Why did I say uterus?
Captain licks my hand. “Forget I said that.”
“Sunshine!”
Oliver appears from the living room, barefoot, wild-haired, and holding what looks like one of Ethan’s shoes.
I blink at it. “Should I ask?”
“It was cargo.”
“Of course it was.”
“Now it’s a rescue vehicle.”
“Natural career progression.”
He runs straight into me, wrapping his arms around my waist. My heart does that stupid soft thing again, and I rest one hand gently on the back of his head.
“Did you have fun?” I ask.
“Yes. Dad was working but also playing.”
“That sounds like your dad.”
Ethan working on a weekend isn’t surprising. Ethan working through a crisis is even less surprising. The man probably alphabetizes emergencies.
Still, there’s been a tension around him lately. Around the gala, the AI demo. Around Bryce, though I prefer not to let that name float around in my head too long unless I want my blood pressure to reenact a fireworks display.
“Is he still in there?”
Oliver nods. “Dad’s still looking at stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Grown-up plane stuff.”
“Ah. The most suspicious kind.”
Oliver nods solemnly, as if I’ve said something wise.
“Okay, Captain Airport Authority,” I say, clapping my hands once. “What’s the evening plan?”
“Can we make spaghetti?”
“Are we eating it or using it for runway lighting?”
“Eating it.”
“Good clarification.”
The next hour is loud, messy, and exactly what I need.
Oliver helps me make dinner, which means he stirs the sauce with the intense concentration of a surgeon and drops three noodles on the floor that Captain immediately identifies as tribute.
I make him wash his hands twice because somehow marinara ends up on his elbow, and he informs me this is “a chef problem.”
We eat at the kitchen island because the dining table is apparently still partially under aviation control, and Oliver tells me every detail of his day, including Captain’s demotion from security after “unauthorized licking” and Ethan using a serious voice on the phone.
“What kind of serious voice?” I ask, twirling spaghetti around Oliver’s fork because he has decided noodles are “slippery snakes” and therefore suspicious.
“The quiet one.”
My hand stills for half a second. I don’t like that. It makes me want to knock on whatever door he’s shut behind and annoy him until he opens it. Which may not be healthy, but honestly, neither is pretending rich men with control issues can solve their emotional problems by staring out windows.
“I see,” I say.
Oliver doesn’t notice my shift. He's too busy trying to convince Captain, from across the room, that dogs cannot have garlic.
After dinner, we build a pillow control tower, supervise two emergency landings, read three books, argue over pajamas, and spend six full minutes looking for a toy plane that was, in a shocking twist, already in Oliver’s bed.
By the time I tuck him in, my good mood has settled into a tired warmth.
Oliver snuggles under the covers, eyelids heavy but not quite surrendered. “Sunshine?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you going to the fancy plane party?”
I smile. “The gala? Yes.”
“With Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
He nods sleepily. “He looks less lonely when you’re there.”
Oh. Well… great. Just stab me directly in the heart, why don’t you?
I sit very still because five-year-olds shouldn't be allowed to casually say things that unravel adults.
“That’s sweet,” I manage.
“It’s true.”
He yawns, already drifting.
I brush a curl back from his forehead. “Go to sleep, little pilot.”
“Night, Sunshine.”
“Night, Oliver.”
I leave the room quietly, closing the door most of the way.
Then I stand in the hall.
He looks less lonely when you’re there.
Cool. Wonderful. Very normal thing to have echoing around in your chest when you’re trying not to fall catastrophically in love with your boss.
I should go to my room. That would be the smart thing, the professional thing, the thing a woman with survival instincts would do.
Instead, I find myself walking toward Ethan’s office, because apparently my survival instincts are decorative.
The door is partly open. I hear nothing at first. No typing. No voices. Then the faint sound of a page turning. A trackpad.
I knock gently against the doorframe.
Ethan looks up.
And there it is.
That face.
Controlled, handsome, infuriating. But something is wrong underneath it. Not obvious to anyone who doesn’t know how to read the tiny fractures in him.
Unfortunately, I’m starting to.
His tie is gone, his shirtsleeves are rolled to his forearms, his hair is slightly messed, like he’s dragged his hand through it too many times and then resented the evidence.
The laptop is open in front of him, along with printed pages spread across the desk in precise, terrifying little piles.
“You’re back,” he says. “How was Sophie?”
“Loud. Invasive. Fed me against my will.”
“Good.”
“That isn't sympathy.”
I step into the office, glancing at the desk. “What is all this?”
His posture shifts. “Work.”
“Obviously. I wasn’t under the impression you were scrapbooking.”
He doesn’t answer, which means: not just work.
I move closer. The papers are dense with diagrams, code strings, timelines, and technical notes. Most of it might as well be ancient runes written by robots, but a few words jump out.
Stabilization, failsafe, telemetry, accident review.
“Is this about the gala demo?”
His silence answers before he does. “Partly.”
“Partly,” I repeat.
He exhales quietly through his nose. “The corruption in the demo code reminded me of something.”
My stomach tightens. “Something from Megan’s crash?”
“Yes.”
I forget, briefly, how to breathe. “Oh.”
He looks away first. “I compared the current corrupted stabilization sequence with old documentation from the accident investigation.”
“And?”
“They’re not identical.”
“Okay.”
“But the architecture is similar.”
I move to the chair across from him slowly and sit without asking. “Similar how?”
He studies me, like he’s deciding whether I’ll understand. Then, maybe remembering I once spotted things in his work documents because I’m nosy and annoyingly observant, he turns the laptop slightly toward me.
“The current system has a failsafe layer designed to prevent overcorrection. If the aircraft receives conflicting data, the system is supposed to slow itself down.”
I frown at the screen. “Slow itself down?”
“Yes. Think of it like power steering. If the correction becomes too aggressive, the failsafe reduces input long enough for the pilot to regain control.”
“So the system is supposed to back off.”
“Exactly.”
I look back at the highlighted sections. “But this one didn’t.”
“No. It kept escalating instead.”
“That sounds important.”
“It is.”
“And it’s not doing that?”
“In the corrupted demo, no. The layer appears intact during diagnostics, but under specific conditions, it’s bypassed.”
I stare at the screen. Some of it still looks like nonsense. But the shape of what he’s saying makes sense. “So it looks safe until it actually needs to be safe.”
His gaze fixes on me. “Yes.”
“And Megan’s plane? How is it linked? Show me.”
He stills. “Addy—”
“Show me.”
“This isn’t—”
I fold my arms across my chest. “I know it’s not easy.”
“That’s not the concern.”
“Then what is?”
He holds my gaze. “I don’t want to pull you into something ugly.”
“Ethan, I was dumped at an airport by a man who lied about an entire apartment and then reappeared in your dining room with his affair girlfriend. Ugly and I are already acquainted.”
His mouth tightens.
The mention of Bryce still changes the atmosphere.
“I’m not fragile,” I add.
“I know that.”
“Then stop treating me like I’ll break if I see the hard parts.”
He turns the laptop fully toward me. “Here.”
And just like that, I’m in.
The next twenty minutes are a crash course in systems I have no business understanding and yet somehow start to follow because Ethan explains them like a pilot, not a tech bro. He doesn’t dumb it down, which I appreciate. He just builds the logic step by step until the pieces begin to connect.
I don’t understand the code itself.
Honestly, most of it still looks like someone taught a spreadsheet anxiety.
But patterns?
Patterns I understand.
The AI demo code, the corrupted stabilization loop, the dampening layer that should stop escalation, the old aircraft documentation.
Megan’s flight.
The report, the gap… the ugly little gap.
I lean closer, elbows on my knees, scanning the printed sheets while he explains. “So this line here means the system thought the dampening layer was still active?”
“Yes.”
“But this output says it wasn’t actually changing anything.”
His eyes flick to mine. “Correct.”
“Which is weird.”
“Very.”
I furrow my brows. “And this is from Megan’s aircraft?”
“Yes.”
I pick up another page, comparing it to the one beside it. “And this is the demo?”
“Yes.”
“They look different.”
“They are different systems.”
“But…”
I pause and squint. This is probably where someone with actual engineering credentials would have a meaningful thought. I, however, am operating on nanny pattern recognition, caffeine, and stubbornness.
“But they fail the same way,” I say.
Ethan goes still.
I look up. “Right?”
His gaze sharpens.
I point between the pages. “I mean, not the code. Obviously. I’m not pretending I suddenly know plane robot language.”
His eyebrow lifts faintly.
“But this part.” I tap the demo failure sequence. “It says here the correction repeats after bad feedback.”
“Yes.”
“And here.” I tap Megan’s report. “Same idea, right? It keeps reacting to bad information like it thinks the pilot is the problem.”
He doesn’t speak.
Then he reaches for the page. “Show me.”
I feel a small flutter of nerves. “I could be wrong.”
“Show me.”
Okay then. Bossy pilot voice has entered the chat.
I sit forward, tracing the timeline with my finger. “Here. This one is labeled as pilot response delay, right?”
“Yes.”
“But right before it, the system logs a warning, then a correction, then another warning almost immediately.”
“Yes.”
“And in the demo, that same thing happens here. Warning, correction, warning. But in the demo notes, you marked that as the system creating its own escalation.”
His eyes move over the documents.
“And,” I continue, gaining confidence, “if Megan was really as good as you say she was—”
“She was.”
“Then why would the report treat that pause like she did nothing? Couldn’t it have been that the system was already fighting her?”
The room goes very quiet. I look at him, and his control looks like something he’s having to actively hold in place.
“Ethan?”
He takes the page from me now. He turns back to the laptop, pulls up another file, and begins typing.
I wait, heart thudding. “What did I say?”
“You noticed the timing.”
“I noticed… paper?”
“The sequence between the automated correction and the recorded pilot input.”
“That sounds better. Let’s use yours.”
He pulls up a flight timeline in terrifying detail. Columns of timestamps. Inputs. Warnings. Autopilot status. Manual controls. System response. Then another screen beside it. The demo simulation.
He aligns them.
My skin prickles because even I can see it now. The spaces between events are wrong. Or maybe they’re right in the wrong way.
“That gap,” I say quietly.
“Yes.”
“It’s not her hesitating.”
His jaw tightens. “No.”
“What is it?”
He stares at the screen. “The system accepted her input late.”
My stomach drops. “What does that mean?”
“It means she may have responded correctly.”
“But the aircraft didn’t register it in time?” I ask.
“Or the logs were altered to make it appear she didn’t.”
Oh.
The office seems to lose oxygen.
I sit back slowly. “Ethan.”
He doesn’t look at me. His attention is locked on the screen like if he looks away, the truth might vanish. I stand and move around the desk before I can overthink it. He remains seated, one hand on the trackpad, the other curled loosely near the papers.
I place my hand over his.
He freezes. Then his fingers turn, just slightly, catching mine. “She fought it. I knew she would have.” He turns to look at me. “She would’ve known what to do.”
My throat tightens. “Then maybe now you can prove that.”
“I might be able to now,” he admits. “You may have found the thing I missed.”