The words on the screen pierced Kyla's eyes like daggers piercing her calm exterior.
Outside the living room's floor-to-ceiling windows, the night was a thick, suffocating blanket, isolating the city's noise.
Inside the house, a single dim floor lamp barely outlined Kyla's slender figure curled up on the sofa.
Her fingers hovered above the screen, trembling ever so slightly.
It had been five years. For five entire years, she had deliberately sealed away those memories, covering them with thick scars, believing that as long as she didn't retrieve them, the pain would remain dormant.
Yet, Blaine's few words were like a precise scalpel, effortlessly slicing open that seemingly solid scar, exposing the raw, bleeding wound beneath.
The courtroom scenes from those days, the details she had forcibly forgotten, now surged back into her mind.
She recalled the endless piles of paperwork and sleepless nights, the constant worry etched into Gerald's expression, and Seawise Group's legal team's irrational, almost suicidal, attack strategy.
She had to admit it defied business logic.
A colossal group with a market value in the billions, employing top-tier lawyers, even going so far as to falsify evidence, all to target a doctoral student yet to graduate. It was a farce indeed.
Everyone back then assumed it was the personal vendetta of a senior executive of Seawise Group or a preemptive strike to suppress a competitor.
Kyla had thought so, too. She saw the case as a battle of capital bullying the weak, and she fueled her determination with that belief.
She won. It was a resounding victory that captured the entire legal community's attention.
But now, in hindsight, she realized that her victory back then seemed tainted with an eerie strangeness from the start.
Her phone buzzed again, and a new encrypted file with a note was received. "Take a look at this."
Kyla's heart skipped a beat. She took a deep breath and, with fingers tinged with cold, opened the file.
After decompressing, she found it was a high-resolution image, apparently a screenshot of an email on a computer.
The sender was a vice president of Seawise Group at the time, addressed to the legal department.
The email content was brief, but a chemical term burned into Kyla's retinas like a branding iron. XH-97 formula defect.
The email explicitly mentioned that the formula posed an irreversible risk of neurological damage in pre-clinical testing and must be intercepted at all costs before it hit the market.
XH-97...
Kyla knew the name all too well.
It was the cornerstone of Gerald's glory, the core of his doctoral thesis, and the subject of a paper that had shocked the entire biopharmaceutical field.
Kyla's mind raced, comparing the email's date with the timeline of Gerald's thesis submission and patent application. They matched perfectly.
Seawise Group filed the lawsuit just a week after Gerald had submitted his patent application. In other words, Seawise Group wasn't falsely accusing but was trying to stop him.
An absurd yet perfectly logical thought spread in her heart like a creeping vine of doubt.
Kyla abruptly stood up from the sofa, and the sudden movement made her dizzy. She steadied herself against the cold wall, barely managing to stay upright.
She suddenly remembered something. During the final trial, in the cross-examination phase, the opposing lawyer posed a sharp question about the drug's later-stage risk assessment.
At the time, Gerald, as a witness, had a very brief pause. His lips parted, as though he was about to speak, but ultimately, he answered with the prepared response he and Kyla had rehearsed.
At that time, Kyla had thought he was just nervous and even comforted him during recess.
Reflecting now, she couldn't help wondering what kind of storm was hidden in that brief silence.
