Chapter 10 - THE TABLE WITH FOUR CHAIRS
Greer convened a meeting with four voting participants: herself, an Aldercrest representative, the Andean conservation council, and an independent bioethicist.
Rafe attended only as observer. Celeste objected that the meeting lacked corporate authority. A judge allowed it because the tissue preservation order required a temporary scientific plan.
They chose controlled publication. The basic survival protocol would go to five accredited repositories. Commercial sequences would remain sealed. The source community would receive co-governance over future licensing.
The meeting lasted nine hours. Aldercrest wanted exclusivity. The council wanted a complete freeze. Repository scientists warned that delay risked contamination. The bioethicist rejected three proposals because they concentrated emergency authority in one institution.
Greer found the process frustrating precisely because no one could command it. That frustration became evidence the structure was healthier than the secret decisions that brought them there.
When agreement finally came, it was narrower than any participant wanted and safer than what any one of them would have chosen alone.
No single person won ownership.
The Swiss tissue survived.
Nolan responded by releasing private voice messages Greer had sent him during late nights. In them, she complained that Rafe did not understand the work and said the lab was the only place she felt useful.
The messages were real.
Rafe listened before Greer could warn him.
“Did you mean it?” he asked.
“Yes, when I said it.”
He looked wounded, but he did not demand a different answer.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I wanted comfort from Nolan without risking the fight with you.”
Emotional secrecy had not been an affair, but it was still a breach. Greer had made Nolan the person who heard her resentment and left Rafe to interpret distance without context.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Not because he leaked it. Because I used him as a hidden room in our marriage.”
Rafe sat across from her. “And I used money as a hidden room in mine.”
They agreed to continue the divorce process while entering discernment counseling—not to guarantee reconciliation, but to understand whether a new relationship could replace the one they had damaged.
That night, Celeste called an emergency board vote to destroy all remaining lab samples, citing toxic risk.
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The order included Greer’s healthy backup cultures now held as police evidence.
Someone inside the district attorney’s office had told Celeste exactly where they were stored.
