Chapter 2

I watched Mark' s face on the screen of Emily' s phone. He was giving an interview to a major tech blog, looking confident and regretful at the same time. It was a look he had perfected.

"We have to protect our intellectual property," he said, his voice smooth and reasonable. "It' s unfortunate that Ms. Miller, a talented engineer I once mentored, chose this path. We believe she was misled by her late father' s incomplete and often erratic research."

The words were a bitter pill. He was not just attacking my company; he was rewriting history, painting my father as a mad scientist and me as a delusional little girl. The room felt cold, the air thin.

My mind drifted back to the beginning. I was just an intern when I first met Mark. He was my father' s protégé, the brilliant young engineer who could almost keep up with David Miller' s chaotic genius. My dad saw him as the son he never had.

"Mark has the drive, Sarah," my dad used to say, a rare, proud smile on his face. "He' s got the killer instinct. I have the ideas, he knows how to sell them."

I fell for that drive, too. Mark was charming, ambitious, and he seemed to understand the strange, wonderful world my father and I lived in. We spent late nights at the lab, fueled by coffee and a shared passion for technology. He proposed to me under the glow of a server rack. It felt right.

But after my father' s sudden death, things changed. The light in our world went out, and in the darkness, Mark' s ambition began to grow, unchecked. He started talking less about innovation and more about market share. He' d look at my father' s notebooks, the ones I treasured, and I' d see a flicker of something in his eyes. Not awe, but calculation. Greed.

The 'third party' in our relationship wasn' t another woman. It was his hunger for success. It was the siren song of Silicon Valley fame and fortune, and it was louder than my voice, louder than my father' s legacy.

He started sidelining me in conversations, dismissing my input on the technology. "Let me handle the business side, Sarah," he' d say. "You focus on the code."

When he announced he was leaving to start Johnson Dynamics, he asked me to come with him. I refused. I wanted to build on my father' s work, not package it for a quick sale. That was the first time he looked at me like I was an obstacle.

His acquisition of my father' s old company, Miller Innovations, was the next blow. He didn' t even tell me it was happening. I read about it in a press release, just like this one. He was consuming my past, piece by piece. He took the company, the lab, even some of my father' s old patents he claimed were part of the deal.

I tried to fight it then, tried to make him see he was erasing my father. "This isn' t what he would have wanted, Mark!" I had yelled at him over the phone.

"What he wanted was to succeed," Mark had shot back, his voice like ice. "He just didn' t know how. I do."

That was the last time we spoke until today.

I looked up from the phone, back at the silent, watching faces of the investors. I felt a wave of exhaustion so profound it almost buckled me. He had been planning this for years. Every step, every move, was designed to lead to this moment: him on top, and me with nothing.

He thought he had won. He thought I would crumble.

But as I looked at the headline again, something inside me shifted. The grief and the shock hardened into a cold, clear resolve. He had underestimated me. He had underestimated my father.

I stood up, my hands steady.

"Mr. Hayes," I said, my voice quiet but firm. "Thank you for your time. This meeting is over."

I turned and walked out of the room, Emily right behind me. The fight wasn't over. It had just begun. I had one thing Mark didn' t: the box. The last, unsorted, chaotic box of my father' s final research. And I knew, with a certainty that settled deep in my bones, that the answer was in there.