Then Ingrid handed me an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“Found in the corporate archive.”
I opened it.
Inside was a photograph.
Black and white.
Three people standing beside a bulky machine in what looked like a warehouse.
Jonathan Wexford.
Elias Lane.
And a woman.
My grandmother.
Young.
Maybe thirty-five.
Hair tied back.
Holding a circuit board.
On the back, handwritten:
Opal’s prototype caught the fault before ours did.
Again.
I looked at Ingrid.
“Prototype?”
She smiled.
“You thought your grandmother was only an investor?”
My heart stopped.
“What?”
“We’ve been digitizing early technical archives.”
She handed me another page.
An engineering memo.
Authored by:
Opal R.
Prescott.
I stared.
“No.”
“Your grandmother helped design the company’s first predictive fault system.”
I could not breathe.
No one had told me.
Not Dad.
Not Mom.
Not even Grandma.
“She was an engineer?”
“Mathematician originally.
Then systems design.”
I sat.
