The one group he needed to convince of his innocence now had his own voice admitting to burying the truth. The self-inflicted wound was complete.

The only question left was what Frank would do with the power he had just been handed. The emergency board meeting was held in the rink’s upstairs conference room at 7 the next evening.

Voss sat at the end of a long folding table, his face gray under the fluorescent lights.

The audio file had already been circulated. The board chair, a retired school superintendent named Margaret Shore, played it once without comment. Voss said it was doctored.

A voice analysis firm hired the same afternoon confirmed it was not. His voice, his cadence, his specific phrase manageable matched five other files from the same era. By unanimous vote, Voss was suspended without pay pending a full external review.

He left through the back door, but not before looking toward the maintenance bay where Frank was closing down the machine. Frank did not see him.

He was scrolling through his phone for the first time in years, reading the comments, the stories, the posts from strangers. Most made him feel exposed. A few made him feel something he had forgotten. Seen.

A former teammate from the national team posted a picture of Frank holding a training medal and wrote, “The only thing Frank cheated was the ice in his water bottle.” The post was shared 60,000 times.

By morning, the rink’s parking lot was full of cameras and news vans. The rink board shut down operations for a week. Frank had nowhere to drive. That was the first time he went inside and sat with Dana in the empty bleachers.

Dana had been working for 40 hours straight. She had received two more envelopes. One contained a scanned handwritten note from Voss to a Federation legal officer dated three days before Frank’s appeal hearing.

It read, “No need to call the lab. The narrative is already set.” The second envelope held a photograph of Voss at a lakeside restaurant with a senior Federation vice president. Both men smiling, both men holding folded envelopes. The photo was stamped with the same word, Voss.