The complication, when it arrived, came not from Adaeze but from a corner of the Whitfield-Ansah family Wren hadn't anticipated needing to account for at all — Adaeze's own father, Marcus's surviving son, a retired postal worker named Emmanuel Whitfield-Ansah who had spent the better part of eighty years believing, firmly and without apparent doubt, that his father's departure from Vale Industries had been entirely voluntary, and who reacted to his daughter's careful, well-researched presentation of the committee's findings with a resistance that surprised everyone involved.
"He won't hear it," Adaeze told Wren, during a call that carried considerably more frustration than their previous conversations had. "I brought him the correspondence, the payroll records, all of it, laid out as care
