Catherine Collins stared at the name beneath the old schematic.
Jack Miller.
Not handwritten in the corner.
Not added later in pencil.
His name appeared in the original document block beside a date that predated his employment at Nexus Technologies by years.
She looked up slowly.
Jack stood across the garage beneath a fluorescent light, still wearing his faded blue janitorial uniform.
The black component he had removed from the Nexus server room sat on the workbench between them.
“You designed this?” Catherine asked.
Jack’s eyes moved toward the partially open garage door.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Neither should a component from my server room.”
His jaw tightened.
“It was failing.”
“That’s not an answer.”
From inside the house came the muffled sound of a television and a child’s laugh.
Jack glanced toward the door connecting the garage to the kitchen.
The movement told Catherine more than his words did.
Whatever he was hiding, he did not want the confrontation entering the house.
She lowered her voice.
“I have a month of security footage showing you inside restricted areas after hours.
Executive offices.
R&D.
Servers.
Employees think someone is touching their computers.
My security chief wanted you fired this morning.”
Jack gave a humorless smile.
“I’m surprised it took this long.”
Catherine’s anger sharpened.
“You find this amusing?”
“No.
I find it predictable.”
He removed his work gloves and laid them beside the component.
“You see a janitor near a computer and assume he must be stealing from it.”
“I see an employee removing hardware from a restricted server room and taking it home.
That’s not an assumption.”
Jack nodded once.
“Fair.”
The simple concession disarmed her more than denial would have.
He pulled a stool from beneath the bench but did not sit.
“That part is a thermal sensor from the legacy control rack.
It was drifting out of tolerance.
I replaced it with a spare from an unused test unit before I took this one.
I brought the bad one home because I wanted to confirm why it failed.”
“You expect me to believe you’re performing unauthorized maintenance after midnight?”
“No.”
“Then what do you expect me to believe?”
Jack looked at the folder in her hands.
“What’s already in there.”
Catherine opened it wider.
The first pages were old engineering diagrams.
Some were printed; others were covered in notes, calculations, corrections, and dates.
A faded logo appeared on several pages: a small technology firm Catherine vaguely remembered from due-diligence summaries prepared before she became CEO.
Nexus had not purchased that company directly.
Years earlier, it had acquired a portfolio of technology from an intermediary that had bought assets after the smaller firm failed.
The architecture had later become the foundation of the platform Catherine was now preparing to launch.
