Lena called her into the office on Friday afternoon.
Maren had been expecting this. She'd been counting the days since her unauthorized terminal session, calibrating the likelihood of detection had Henrik's maintenance request triggered a flag? Had the guest credentials been audited? Had someone noticed that a signal-decomposition algorithm not in Sollen's software suite had been executed on a company terminal?
She'd prepared for this the way she prepared for everything: with data. She had explanations. She had cover stories. She had the calm, steady gaze of a woman who had practiced looking innocent in the bathroom mirror and discovered she was very good at it.
But Lena didn't mention the terminal.
"Close the door," Lena said.
Maren closed it. The office sealed itself around them the walnut desk, the fiddle-leaf fig, the bookshelves with their curated spines. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the harbor gleamed with the flat, metallic light of late November.
Lena was sitting not at her desk but on the small sofa by the windows the informal zone, the space she used for conversations she wanted to feel like conversations rather than meetings. She gestured to the seat beside her. Maren took it.
"You look exhausted," Lena said. Her voice had the warm, low register she reserved for concern genuine concern, or its most convincing facsimile. "How much are you sleeping?"
"Not enough."
"Maren." Lena leaned forward. Her hands were folded in her lap, her posture open, her face arranged in an expression of such perfectly calibrated maternal worry that Maren, despite everything she now knew, felt the pull of it the gravitational warmth of a woman who appeared to care. "I'm going to say something, and I want you to hear it as a friend, not a supervisor."
"All right."
"You've been pushing too hard. The trial, the FDA timeline, the anomaly reports you're carrying it all, and it's wearing you down. I can see it." She paused. A breath. "And I've been thinking about what you mentioned the custody situation with David. I know how much Alma means to you. I know that the arrangement is fragile."
Maren's hands were still. She did not react. She had learned, somewhere in the past week, to separate what she felt from what she showed, the way a swimmer separates the surface from the current.
"I think you should take a leave of absence," Lena said. "Not a long one. Just through the holidays. Let the monitoring team handle the day-to-day, and I'll personally oversee the FDA submission. You've done the work the hard work, the brilliant work. Let me carry it across the finish line while you rest."
"And the anomaly reports?"
"I'll handle them. If there's a systemic issue, I'll escalate to the safety board. If it's statistical noise which I believe it is I'll document and close. Either way, it'll be managed. You don't need to carry this."
Maren looked at Lena's face. She studied it with the same analytical attention she brought to polysomnography readouts looking for the signal beneath the surface, the hidden frequency, the meaning behind the meaning.
Lena's face showed nothing she hadn't decided to show.
"I appreciate the concern," Maren said. "But I'd prefer to stay on the trial."
Lena nodded slowly. The nod of a woman adjusting to a response she'd anticipated. "I understand. But let me add something. And again this is me speaking as someone who cares about you."
She reached into the folder beside her a thin manilla folder that Maren hadn't noticed, because it was exactly the color of the sofa cushion, which might have been coincidence and might have been stagecraft.
She opened the folder. Inside: a printout. Two pages. Maren read the header upside down before Lena turned it toward her.
Family Court of Massachusetts Custody and Visitation Records.
"I have connections in family law," Lena said. "Good connections. The kind that can make a custody arrangement very stable or very unstable. I'm not saying anything's going to happen. I'm saying that a mother who's overworked, undersleeping, showing signs of cognitive fatigue that's a mother whose fitness could be questioned. Not by me. By a system that doesn't care about context."
Maren felt the air leave the room. Not literally the climate control hummed on, the vents breathed, the fiddle-leaf fig swayed in its manufactured breeze. But the oxygen content of the conversation dropped to zero, and what was left was the pure, cold architecture of a threat delivered with a smile.
"You're threatening me."
"I'm protecting you." Lena closed the folder. "I'm telling you that the best thing you can do for your work, for your daughter, for yourself is to step back. Let me handle the anomalies. Let the company's legal team support your custody case. David is reasonable, but reasonable men become unreasonable when their lawyers tell them they can win. I can make sure his lawyers never get that message."
Maren looked at the folder. At Lena's hands, folded again in her lap. At the bergamot perfume filling the space between them with its sweetness and its metallic undertone.
"And if I don't step back?"
Lena's expression didn't change. That was the answer. The expression that didn't change was the threat the face of a woman who had already considered every outcome and chosen the one she preferred.
"I think you should go home," Lena said warmly. "Get some sleep. Spend the weekend with Alma. And on Monday, let me know what you've decided."
Maren stood. She picked up her bag. She walked to the door. Her hand was on the handle when Lena spoke again.
"Maren."
She turned.
"Have some water." Lena gestured to the glass on the side table filtered water in a crystal tumbler, perfectly clear, perfectly cold.
Maren looked at the water. She looked at Lena. She thought about a 6 Hz signal and a drug that kept the brain's door open and a woman who had spent two years deciding what to put through it.
"No, thank you," she said.
She walked out. She took the elevator to the lobby. She crossed the atrium with its etched logo and its expensive typography. She pushed through the glass doors and walked into the parking garage, where the air was cold and smelled of concrete and exhaust, and she made it to the third row of cars before she leaned against a concrete pillar and vomited.
It was not a dramatic vomiting. It was efficient quick, contained, her body expelling what her mind couldn't process. She wiped her mouth with a tissue from her bag. She stood straight. She got in her car.
She did not cry. She would cry later, but not now. Now she drove home and checked the lock twice and sat in the kitchen and looked at the refrigerator drawings and thought about what Lena had said.
A mother whose fitness could be questioned.
This was the trap. Not a physical trap no locked doors, no weapons, no dramatic confrontation. The trap was administrative. Legal. Institutional. It was the quiet violence of paperwork and precedent and the slow machinery of a family court that measured a mother's worth in billable hours and psychological evaluations and the testimonies of experts who could be hired by anyone with a legal budget.
Lena wasn't threatening to hurt Maren. She was threatening to redefine her to transform her, through documentation and persuasion, from a brilliant scientist and devoted mother into a stressed, sleep-deprived woman whose judgment was impaired. And the worst part the part that made Maren lean against the kitchen counter and press her fists against her temples was that it would work. Because Maren was stressed. She was sleep-deprived. Her judgment was altered not by a clinical condition, but by the discovery that her employer had used her brain as a template library and her drug as a delivery mechanism for memory modification without consent.
But a court wouldn't know that. A court would see what Lena showed it.
She poured a glass of wine. A Malbec she'd bought in October and hadn't opened. She sat at the table and held it and did not drink.
Step back. Let Lena handle the anomalies. Let the company's lawyers manage the custody arrangement. Keep Alma. Keep her life. Just stop looking.
It was a reasonable offer. That was the horror of it. It was reasonable.