Page 240 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

Except not different enough.

Four years ago, the crash investigation treated Megan’s aircraft as an isolated failure.

We were looking for mechanical instability, pilot error, weather interference, corrupted telemetry, manufacturing flaws. Singular causes. Singular faults.

Nobody was looking for behavioral architecture repetition across entirely different systems because there was nothing to compare it to.

Until now.

The software doesn’t match line by line. It was never going to. Anyone looking for a direct copy would miss it.

But once the superficial architecture is stripped away, once the variables are normalized and the dependency paths are reduced to behavioral logic, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

A feedback amplification loop, a masked failsafe bypass, a delayed pilot input acknowledgment, a diagnostic record showing the safety layer as intact when it was not functionally active.

I stare at the overlay.

There it is.

The ghost in the machine.

Jeffrey exhales through his nose. “Damn it.”

“Yes.”

“I really wanted this to be nothing.”

“So did I.”

He glances at me. “Did you?”

I keep my eyes on the screen. “Yes.”

He lets the silence sit for several seconds. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like part of you has been waiting four years for this to be something.”

My jaw tightens.

“I’m not saying that to be cruel,” he adds.

“I know.”

“I’m saying it because I was there last time.”

Last time.

A useful phrase, if one wants to compress months of obsession, grief, missed dinners with my son, and entire nights spent reviewing telemetry into two syllables.

“I remember,” I say.

“Do you?”

I turn from the monitor. “Yes.”

He holds my gaze, and for once, there’s no humor in him at all. “You nearly disappeared into it.”

“I stopped.”

“Eventually.”