Chapter 5 - Cassandra Had One Reason Elena Didn’t Want to Hear
Cassandra requested a private conversation.
Elena refused.
They met with attorneys present.
“You think this started because I wanted Julian?”
Cassandra asked.
Elena sat with dark glasses now instead of surgical bandages.
Her vision remained blurred and light-sensitive.
“Didn’t it?”
Cassandra laughed bitterly.
“Julian was a consequence.”
“That makes adultery sound very strategic.”
“It wasn’t.”
Cassandra looked down.
“It was selfish.”
Elena waited.
Cassandra had joined Arclight as cofounder.
Yet investors always referred to it as Elena’s company.
Magazine profiles described Elena as “the mind behind Arclight.”
Cassandra became:
her longtime business partner.
She raised capital.
Recruited the first twenty employees.
Built clinical partnerships.
Negotiated manufacturing agreements.
Managed layoffs Elena could not bring herself to make.
“Every time we survived,” Cassandra said, “you became more brilliant.”
Elena felt the accusation land.
“I didn’t write the articles.”
“You didn’t correct them either.”
That was partly true.
Elena had thanked Cassandra in interviews.
Briefly.
Then talked about the science for twenty minutes.
Cassandra continued.
“When Adrian refused the stability projection, I saw another financing collapse coming.”
“So you accused him of falsification.”
“I said the data package was unreliable.”
“You knew why.”
Cassandra looked away.
“I knew enough.”
“That is worse.”
Cassandra’s voice tightened.
“If the financing died, one hundred forty people lost jobs.”
“So you wanted Adrian to sign a claim the data didn’t support.”
“I wanted a defensible projection.”
Adrian’s report already answered that question.
The longer projection was not defensible.
Cassandra had convinced herself uncertainty was negotiable because cash was running out.
Then Elena’s eyesight deteriorated.
Investors became nervous.
Cassandra saw something she had secretly wanted for years:
the chance to become undisputed leader.
“I thought I could save what we built,” she said.
Elena asked:
“By taking it from me?”
Cassandra looked at her.
“By taking it from the version of you who would never admit the company needed someone else.”
That hurt because Elena recognized some truth inside it.
“Then why Julian?”
Cassandra’s face changed.
“Because he was angry at you too.”
Elena almost smiled from the cruelty of it.
Julian felt ignored during Elena’s fundraising years.
He believed she treated marriage the way she treated Arclight:
another system that should keep working while she focused on the next scientific milestone.
None of that excused the affair.
It explained why two resentments found each other.
Cassandra admitted something else.
“Julian told me the Blue Room documents were real.”
Elena became still.
“How did he know about them?”
“He said your cybersecurity team created a clean diligence folder because Adrian’s files were unreliable.”
Elena felt the case shift.
Julian had not accidentally accessed the Blue Room.
He had identified it to Cassandra as the authoritative data room.
Someone had told him enough to know it existed.
May you like
Only four people knew its purpose.
One of them had apparently broken.
