The gathering had started forming in her mind. Then she thought about it the way she thought about difficult operational decisions. Turning it over, testing it from different angles, looking for the points where it could go wrong. It could feel performative. It could come across as the kind of public gesture that a PR team would recommend and an executive would execute without actually changing anything underneath it.
It could embarrass Caleb in a way that was its own kind of disrespect. It could go sideways in any number of directions that she couldn't fully predict. She kept coming back to the fact that it had started in the hangar. Whatever she needed to say, not to manage the situation, not to close a loop with HR, not to satisfy the board's concern about optics. It had started in that specific room in front of those specific people.
And the location mattered, the audience mattered, not because public accountability was a performance, but because private accountability, in this case, was insufficient. The people who had stood in that hanger and watched what happened had been carrying it. She owed them something that was real enough to be witnessed. She called Caleb on a Wednesday afternoon in late April. She had his number from the invoice.
She had not used it for anything personal, and she was aware, dialing, that this call was on a line between professional and something else, and she wasn't certain which side of it she was on. He picked up on the third ring. She could hear workshop sounds in the background, a compressor, something metallic. Sloan, he said, just her name, which meant he'd saved her number, which she registered without making anything of it. I want to ask you something, and I need you to hear the whole question before you answer, she said.
A brief pause. Okay. I want to call a companywide meeting in the main hanger, all shifts, all departments, whoever can be there. And I want to stand in the same place where I fired you and say what I should have said then. Not to fix the record, not for the board, not for press, just because it happened in front of those people and they deserve to see it addressed in front of those people.
She stopped. I want you there. That's the ask. You don't have to say anything. You don't have to participate in any way.
I just think you should be there if you want to be. The workshop sounds continued in the background. She waited. Why are you telling me first? He said, "Because it involves you and you should have the choice.
If you don't want it to happen, it doesn't happen. Another pause longer this time. It's your company, he said. You don't need my permission. No, she said, but I want it.
He was quiet for a moment that she couldn't read through a phone line. Then when? 2 weeks, a Friday morning before the first flight of the day. Okay, he said. Okay, you'll be there or okay, you understand?
I'll think about it, he said. That's the best I can give you right now. That's enough, she said. Awesome. She spent the two weeks doing the thing she had always done when something mattered enough to be done correctly, which was to resist the urge to script it.
She had given enough prepared presentations in her professional life to know the difference between words that had been crafted to land and words that had actually come from somewhere. The board received the crafted ones. The breakroom got something closer to the real version. What she was planning for the hanger could not be crafted. If it was crafted, it would be hollow and everyone in the room would know it because the people who worked in that hanger had spent years developing precise instruments for detecting the difference between something true and something performed.
She told her senior staff one week out. She framed it simply, a company address, mandatory attendance where possible, a safety and culture review. She did not tell them what she was going to say. Howell nodded and asked no questions. Her communications director looked slightly alarmed and asked if she should prepare remarks, and Sloan said no.
Aldrich found out through some channels she still hadn't identified and called to ask what she was doing. And she told him it was an internal address and he should not be concerned. And he told her he was always concerned when executives gave unscripted public remarks. And she told him she understood and thanked him for calling and hung up. She called Caleb again on the Thursday before.
I'm going to be there, he said before she got the question out. Okay, she said. Garrett thinks I'm an idiot for going. What do you think? A pause.
I think I want to see it. He said, I've been trying to figure out what that says about me. I haven't landed on an answer. Maybe it doesn't say anything, she said. Maybe you're just curious.