38. Ethan
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Ethan
I should’ve gone to the hospital.
That’s the first coherent thought I have when morning becomes harsher than dawn, and the city outside my windows brightens into a pale, indifferent gray.
I should’ve gone.
Instead, I’m in my home office with two cold cups of coffee, an untouched plate of toast Diane left “for my nerves,” and three monitors filled with code that no longer appears to be a malfunction.
It’s intent.
Oliver is in the living room with Captain.
I can hear him sometimes through the half-open office door, his small voice rising and falling as he explains to the dog that airplanes don’t sleep in garages, they sleep in hangars, and Captain cannot be trusted with landing gear because he has “mouth crimes.”
Normally, that would make me smile.
This morning, it lands somewhere behind the glass wall I seem to be standing behind.
My phone is on silent beside my keyboard.
Face down.
A terrible decision made for practical reasons.
I text Addy first thing. Not enough. Not nearly enough, but something. Then Jeffrey called again, Sara after him, then the demo lead, then legal, and the morning fractured into urgency before I could catch up to my own life.
I told myself I would check my phone again in five minutes.
That was two hours ago.
On the center monitor, Bryce’s patch sits in a quarantined sandbox, mapped against the original corrupted demo sequence. On the left, Jeffrey’s anomaly report. On the right, a memory allocation trace that shouldn’t exist unless someone knew exactly where to hide what they didn’t want found.
A backdoor.
I don’t want the word to be true.
I’m staring directly at its architecture, and I still don’t want it.
Because sabotage is one thing.
Sabotage can be external. Anonymous, competitive, ugly, but clean in the way corporate threat models are clean. You identify the breach, contain it, prosecute it, improve the system, and move forward.
This is different.
This was offered as help by someone I used to trust implicitly.
Bryce may be arrogant, reckless, desperate to prove he still belongs in rooms he walked away from.
But this is something else.
I keep searching for incompetence instead of intent.
A mistake, ego, sloppy coding. Anything.
But the deeper I dig into the architecture, the harder it becomes to explain this away as carelessness.
This is a man I once trusted enough to build with. A man who knew the bones of my company before anyone cared what Strong AeroTech might become. A man who sat in cheap conference rooms with me while we ate vending machine dinners and argued about stabilization logic until two in the morning.
A man who came into my home with Addy’s heartbreak on his hands and smiled as if the universe owed him better seating.
The code doesn’t care who he was.
The code is honest.
People rarely are.
I run the trace again.
The hidden function only activates under a narrow set of conditions. Demo environment. Predictive correction layer engaged. Remote telemetry stream active. It doesn’t break the system immediately. It doesn’t crash anything. Not obviously.
It waits.
Then it opens a pathway. A controlled vulnerability buried inside a correction.
My hands still over the keyboard.
The realization settles slowly enough that part of me keeps trying to reject it.
Bryce didn’t stabilize the demo.
He embedded access inside it.
A banging at my door grabs my attention.
I open up, already irritated, and find Jeffrey standing there in yesterday’s suit, hair disheveled, tie crooked, expression grim enough to strip every protest from my mouth.
Jeffrey crosses the room, drops a folder on my desk, and looks at the screens. “You found it.”
“Yes.”
“I was hoping you hadn’t.”
“So was I.”
He exhales and scrubs a hand down his face. “It’s not just a vulnerability, Ethan.”
“I know.”
“No, listen to me. The team found a callback embedded three layers under the patch wrapper. It’s dormant unless it receives a specific external signal. Whoever wrote it could use the demo environment as a bridge into archived development systems.”
My pulse slows.
That is never good. In a cockpit, fear spikes. Training makes the body go colder, sharper, quieter.
“Archived systems,” I repeat.
Jeffrey nods. “Megan’s aircraft framework is in archived development.”
“Yes.”
The room tilts by a degree no one else would notice.
I sit down slowly.
Jeffrey watches me. “Say something.”
“Show me.”
He opens the folder and pulls out printed logs, because he knows me well enough to understand that when the world becomes unstable, I trust paper. Screens can shift. Paper forces sequence.
He lays them across the desk.
Access request. Redirect attempt. Blocked privilege escalation. Time-stamped pings routed through Bryce’s patch.
My company’s current AI demo wasn’t the only target.
“Ethan.”
“He planted it?”
Even saying the words feels wrong.
Jeffrey exhales slowly. “The code says he did.”
“He offered to help, and he planted it.” Jeffrey says nothing. “He was in my home.”
“I know.”
Anger comes then, clean and hot enough to burn through the numbness. I welcome it. Anger is easier than grief. Anger has direction. Anger moves.
I stand too quickly, chair rolling back and hitting the wall. “What the hell is he doing?”
Jeffrey doesn’t flinch. “That’s the question.”
“No.” I grab my phone. “The question is whether he answers before I find him.”
The screen lights up. Fourteen missed calls. Messages stacked over messages. Sara. Legal. Jeffrey. Addy.
No Bryce.
I call him anyway.
It rings seven times, then cuts to voicemail.
I call again.
Same result.
Jeffrey watches me with the expression of a man witnessing a disaster land exactly where he feared it would. “Ethan.”
I lower the phone slowly. “He’s ignoring me.”
“That’s not exactly a confession.”
“No.” I stare back at the logs. “But I’m running out of explanations that make sense.”
Jeffrey leans both hands on the desk. “We need to contain this before Sara finds out you’re personally hunting him down and turns it into a crisis calendar.”
“Sara already knows enough.”
“Sara knows there’s a breach. She doesn’t know your former business partner embedded a backdoor into a safety demo tied to the most important public presentation this company has made in years.”
“She will in ten minutes.”
“She’ll kill someone.”
“I’ll ask her to wait.”
Jeffrey gives me a humorless look. “Generous.”
I drag a hand over my face, exhaustion and fury grinding together beneath my skin. Addy is in the hospital. Oliver is in the next room. Bryce may have compromised my company, my system, my past, and somehow, impossibly, all of it is happening at once.
My phone buzzes in my hand.
Addy.
Everything in me stops.
I answer before the second vibration. “Addy.”
There’s a tiny pause. “Hey.”
I close my eyes. “How are you?”
“I’m okay.” She sounds tired. Too careful. “Still here. Luci arrived.”
Relief hits hard enough that I have to grip the desk. “Good.”
“You called her.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“You shouldn’t have been alone.”
There’s another pause. I hear movement on her end. Hospital noise. A distant voice. My chest tightens.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“For what?”
“For leaving. For not coming back. For not being there this morning.”
“Ethan…”
My stomach sinks as the guilt overcomes me again. “I should have handled it differently.”
“You had Oliver.”
Jeffrey turns away, giving me privacy he knows I barely deserve.
Addy exhales softly. “Are you okay?”
A laugh almost breaks out of me. Not because it’s funny. Because nothing is. “No.”
“Oh.”
“But that isn’t your fault.” I shut my eyes again. “I’m dealing with something here.”
“Work?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need to go?”
“I don’t want to,” I say.
Her voice gentles. “But you have to.”
I hate that she makes it easy. I hate that she thinks she has to. “I’ll come as soon as I can.”
“Okay.”
Then she’s gone, leaving me the feeling of falling without somewhere to land, of sinking underwater and unable to breathe, of knowing that I’m messing everything up without any clue how to fix it.