Page 217 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

This was offered as help by someone I used to trust implicitly.

Bryce may be arrogant, reckless, desperate to prove he still belongs in rooms he walked away from.

But this is something else.

I keep searching for incompetence instead of intent.

A mistake, ego, sloppy coding. Anything.

But the deeper I dig into the architecture, the harder it becomes to explain this away as carelessness.

This is a man I once trusted enough to build with. A man who knew the bones of my company before anyone cared what Strong AeroTech might become. A man who sat in cheap conferencerooms with me while we ate vending machine dinners and argued about stabilization logic until two in the morning.

A man who came into my home with Addy’s heartbreak on his hands and smiled as if the universe owed him better seating.

The code doesn’t care who he was.

The code is honest.

People rarely are.

I run the trace again.

The hidden function only activates under a narrow set of conditions. Demo environment. Predictive correction layer engaged. Remote telemetry stream active. It doesn’t break the system immediately. It doesn’t crash anything. Not obviously.

It waits.

Then it opens a pathway. A controlled vulnerability buried inside a correction.

My hands still over the keyboard.

The realization settles slowly enough that part of me keeps trying to reject it.

Bryce didn’t stabilize the demo.

He embedded access inside it.

A banging at my door grabs my attention.

I open up, already irritated, and find Jeffrey standing there in yesterday’s suit, hair disheveled, tie crooked, expression grim enough to strip every protest from my mouth.

Jeffrey crosses the room, drops a folder on my desk, and looks at the screens. “You found it.”

“Yes.”

“I was hoping you hadn’t.”

“So was I.”

He exhales and scrubs a hand down his face. “It’s not just a vulnerability, Ethan.”

“I know.”

“No, listen to me. The team found a callback embedded three layers under the patch wrapper. It’s dormant unless it receives a specific external signal. Whoever wrote it could use the demo environment as a bridge into archived development systems.”

My pulse slows.

That is never good. In a cockpit, fear spikes. Training makes the body go colder, sharper, quieter.