“Margaret wanted Ethan to lead the new venture,” he said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “But Thomas wanted me to run the technical side as an equal partner.”

He scrolled down to a digitized PDF of a contract with a red stamp across the top.

The stamp read: *TERMINATED – FOR CAUSE*.

“Ethan found out I was testing the code on a private server,” Julian explained. “He and Margaret fabricated a digital paper trail.”

“They made it look like you were selling the proprietary code to our competitors in Chicago,” I whispered.

“Exactly,” Julian said. “They planted the offshore bank accounts under my name, using forged signatures.”

“And Thomas?” I asked. “Your father knew you wouldn’t do that.”

“Thomas tried to defend me,” Julian said, his fingers tightening on the edge of the laptop keyboard. “He had signed the original patent agreement acknowledging my sole ownership of the source code.”

He clicked a folder labeled *Thomas – Correspondence*.

A scanned handwritten letter appeared on the screen, written in Thomas’s shaky, elegant cursive.