Page 93 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

I don’t.

I reach in and take out the top folder. I move to the desk and set it down, opening it with the same controlled care I use for everything else.

Inside are reports, initial findings from the crash investigation, technical breakdowns, system logs, annotations in my own handwriting, sharper in places, erratic in others.

I remember how I was back then.

Obsessive.

But the official conclusion had just come far too quickly.

Pilot error.

A sequence of incorrect responses under system stress, missed indicators, and delayed correction.

I’d read it once, then again, then I’d taken it apart piece by piece because it didn’t align with anything I knew about her.

Megan didn’t miss indicators, didn’t panic under pressure, and didn’t make basic mistakes. She flew through conditions most pilots would’ve refused outright and came back with a quiet shrug and a list of things she’d do differently next time.

And yet, according to the report, she’d failed in ways that didn’t make sense.

At first, they told me it was grief, that I was looking for something to blame because accepting randomness was harder.

They weren’t wrong about the last part, but they were wrong about the rest.

I flip through the pages, scanning the data I already know by memory. Altitude fluctuations, control inputs, stabilization system responses.

There.

That’s where it always catches.

A sequence of corrections that doesn’t quite align with the expected behavior. Easy to overlook if you trust the summary more than the raw data.

I never did.

I pull another file from the stack and open it beside the first. Original system architecture, the early framework, the version that existed before scale refined it, before layers of safety and redundancy were added.

Back when it was just…

I stop.

Because that thought leads directly to… Bee.

He helped design the foundation of this system with Megan and me. The three of us built the earliest iteration together.

Which means if there was a flaw…

I lean back slightly, exhaling once.

No.

This is exactly where the obsession started before.

Pattern hunting, connecting things that may or may not connect, losing time to the possibility that something hidden could be uncovered if I just looked long enough.

It nearly cost me everything that mattered after she died.

Oliver, myself, whatever remained of a life outside this room.