“They will need to draft a statement separating the company from your research.”

“You think I did this?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Arthur said.

“The metadata has your signature.”

“If Vanguard releases those emails, our stock will drop twenty percent by tomorrow morning.”

He picked up his briefcase and walked toward the door.

“Go home, Evelyn,” Arthur said.

“Do not speak to the press.”

He left the lecture hall without looking back.

I stood alone by the presenter’s podium.

The rain began to beat harder against the high windows.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

A notification popped up on the screen.

*Your university account has been disabled.*

My access to the cloud backups was gone.

Every draft of my dissertation, every control sample, every safety log was locked away.

I had nothing left to prove my innocence.

Then I remembered the physical backup drive.

I had kept a secondary, encrypted solid-state drive in our home office.

It contained the raw, unedited sensor logs from the very first synthesis.

Those logs had the original, uncorrupted timestamps.