HE’D LOVED ME SINCE I WAS EIGHTEEN—THEN HE LOOKED AT ME AND ASKED, “GREER, WHAT DO YOU WANT MOST?”

Greer and Rafe met with separate attorneys in a neutral conference room.

The divorce remained active. Neither pretended one moment of shared suspicion repaired years of loneliness.

Rafe admitted why he issued the ultimatum. That morning, Celeste showed him emails suggesting Greer and Nolan planned to transfer the Aurelia patent to a private company after the board review. One message read: Once the plant is secure, Greer will finally leave Rafe.

Greer had never written it.

The emails used phrases from private notes on her home laptop. Someone had stolen enough truth to build a convincing lie.

“You believed I was leaving,” she said.

“I believed you had already left in every way except address.”

“So you made me prove love under a countdown.”

Rafe looked down. “Yes.”

“That was cruel.”

“Yes.”

He did not defend it. The absence of excuse mattered, though it fixed nothing.

Greer admitted her own pattern. Whenever emotion became uncertain, she retreated into work where cause and effect could be measured. She missed dinners, therapy appointments, and the anniversary of Rafe’s mother’s death. Each time, she apologized by promising more time later.

Later had become their marriage.

Their attorneys reviewed the funding contracts. Rafe’s private loans carried no claim to the patents, but a hidden amendment did. If the marriage dissolved while Greer remained project director, Aldercrest received exclusive commercialization rights.

The amendment sat behind a routine equipment schedule. Greer remembered signing the packet on a tablet while Nolan explained a refrigeration upgrade. Rafe’s corporate counsel countersigned the same day, but the lawyer had since left Aldercrest for a firm representing Cascadia.

The trap did not depend on forged names alone. It depended on intelligent people treating routine pages as unworthy of attention—the administrative version of emotional neglect.

Rafe had never seen the amendment.

Celeste’s signature appeared as witness. Nolan’s appeared as scientific co-director.

“I signed a facilities update,” Nolan said when confronted. “They swapped pages.”

Perhaps. Greer no longer accepted certainty as evidence.

The independent facility receiving the orchid belonged to Cascadia Therapeutics, a company quietly negotiating to acquire Aldercrest’s biotech division. Celeste led the negotiations.

Nolan owned stock options through a shell trust.

That night, Greer searched the raw experiment backups stored at home. Eighteen months of sequences remained intact—but one folder had been accessed repeatedly from Nolan’s account.

Inside were animal toxicity results Greer had never seen.