Chapter 157 Ethan’s Choice

Chapter 157 Ethan’s Choice

POV: Ethan

I printed the filing rather than reading it on a screen.

That was a habit I had developed during my time at Meridian, the understanding that documents which mattered deserved to be held in your hands, that something about the physical weight of paper made you read more carefully than a scrolling screen allowed. I printed it at the library, found a quiet table at the back, and read it the way I read everything that required architecture rather than absorption.

Thirty-one pages.

The first read was for shape. I moved through it quickly, not stopping on individual sentences, building a sense of how the document was constructed, where the claims sat in relation to each other, and what the overall structure was trying to accomplish. By the time I reached the end of the first read I understood something important.

This was not designed to win.

A document designed to win in court would have been built differently. It would have concentrated its strongest claims early, established a clear and provable narrative, and avoided anything that introduced complexity the other side could exploit. This document did the opposite. It was deliberately broad, naming multiple alleged instances of my involvement across a long timeline, many of them vague enough that proving or disproving them would require extensive discovery, depositions, document production, months of legal process before any of it reached a courtroom.

I read it a second time, slower, looking specifically for where the weight sat. The weight sat in three places.

The first was a claim that I had participated in strategic planning meetings for eleven months after the point I had publicly stated I understood the operation’s true purpose. If true, it would mean I had known and continued anyway for nearly a year, which directly undermined the account I had given Zane and the public.

The second was a claim that the documentation I had provided to Zane had been selectively curated to remove evidence of my own deeper involvement, framed as me sanitising my own record while exposing others.

The third, and this was the one that made me sit back from the table for a moment, was a claim that I had personally proposed the methodology used in at least two of the case files, including the Edinburgh case, the materials science student whose research had ended up in a patent application eighteen months after her removal.

None of it was true..But that was almost beside the point. I understood, reading it for the third time, exactly what Dominic was doing. He was not trying to prove these claims in a courtroom. He knew, better than anyone, how thin the actual evidence behind them was. What he was doing was forcing a choice.

If I ignored the filing, it would sit on public record, available to anyone who searched my name, a permanent shadow attached to every account I had given. If I fought it properly, defending myself in detail required me to produce extensive documentation about my exact role and timeline inside Meridian, documentation that would inevitably surface details I had not yet made public, things that complicated the clean narrative Zane’s article had built.

He was not trying to win. He was trying to make continuing too expensive. I sat at the library table for a long time after the third read, looking at the thirty-one pages spread in front of me, and thought about what my mother would have said if she had been alive to see this. She had never liked Dominic’s confidence, even when we were young, the particular ease with which he assumed he had already calculated three moves ahead of whoever he was dealing with. She used to say that people who were always certain they had outmanoeuvred everyone eventually ran into someone who simply refused to play the game on the terms they had set.

I picked up my phone and called Zane. He answered on the second ring. “I saw the filing.”

“I read it three times,” I said. “It’s not designed to win. It’s designed to make the cost of continuing higher than the cost of going quiet.”

“I agree,” Zane said. “What do you want to do?”

I had been sitting with the answer for the last twenty minutes of my third read, letting it settle before I said it out loud to anyone, including myself.

“I want to do a full interview,” I said. “On record. Attributed. Live, not written, not a statement I can edit and soften afterward. Everything. The full two years. Every meeting I was actually in. Every model I built and what I understood about each one and when I understood it. The exact timeline of when I knew and what I did during the months between knowing and leaving.”

Zane was quiet.

“Ethan,” he said slowly. “That interview gives Dominic’s legal team material. If you talk in detail about the eleven-month period he’s referencing, you’re handing them your own words to use.”

“I know,” I said.

“It also removes any ambiguity that could currently work in your favour,” he said. “Right now the public narrative is clean. You left, you exposed it, you’re the whistleblower. A detailed account of exactly how long you stayed and what you were thinking during that time is messier than that. People might not respond to messy the way they respond to clean.”

“I know that too,” I said.

“Then why?” Zane asked.

I looked at the thirty-one pages on the table in front of me.

“Because Dominic’s entire strategy depends on me being afraid of the complicated version of my own story,” I said. “He’s betting that I’ll choose silence because silence protects the clean narrative. If I take that bet away from him, if I give the complicated version voluntarily, completely, with no parts held back for him to threaten me with later, there’s nothing left for him to leverage.” I paused. “He can’t blackmail me with information I’ve already given away for free.”

The line was quiet for a moment.

“You understand what you’re asking me to publish,” Zane said. “The eleven months. The fact that you stayed and kept working while you understood, at least partially, what it was. People are going to have opinions about that. Some of them won’t be kind.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’d rather be judged honestly for something true than protected by something incomplete that he can detonate whenever it’s convenient for him.”

Zane was silent for a long moment.

“Are you certain?” he asked finally.

“Schedule it for tomorrow,” I said..