Part 4: The Price of Silence
Frank sank into his armchair, the one he had sat in ten years ago when he had essentially sentenced his daughter to exile. The silence in the room was no longer the heavy, judgmental silence of the past; it was the suffocating silence of a long-overdue reckoning.
"I didn't know," Frank muttered, his head in his hands. "They told me Leo was stealing parts. I trusted the management. They told me he was a bad influence on you."
"And you never checked?" Hannah asked, her voice dangerously calm. "You chose a corporation over your own flesh and blood. You chose the safety of your paycheck over the truth."
Diane sat beside Owen, reaching out a hesitant hand to touch the boy’s hair. Owen looked at her with those observant, intense eyes—the eyes of a boy who had grown up listening to his mother cry at night, wondering who his father was.
"Is he... is he still out there?" Diane asked, her heart breaking for her daughter.
Hannah looked at the USB drive, then back at her father. "Leo is gone, Mom. He didn't make it out of the state. He was 'reassigned' to a branch in another city, then fired, then blacklisted. We lost touch when I was three months pregnant. But he sent me this drive before he was cut off. I spent the last ten years learning how to use it."
"What’s on it?" Frank asked, his voice trembling.
May you like
"The names, the dates, and the signatures," Hannah said. "The signatures of the board members who signed off on the illegal dumping. And, more importantly, the signature of the foreman who ordered the cover-up. The foreman who happens to be your best friend, Gary."
Frank’s face went slack. Gary. The man who had been his fishing buddy, the man who had helped him paint the nursery before the pregnancy, the man who had been the one to tell Frank, "You’re better off without a girl who brings that kind of trouble to your door."
