She thought about how those people must have felt watching it happen. She closed the laptop and looked at the ceiling. She had a company to run. She had a demonstration flight in 10 days, an insurance review on Thursday, a board presentation at the end of the week, and at least four conversations she'd been postponing for 2 weeks that weren't going to postpone themselves any further. The professional machinery of her life would continue regardless of what she was feeling at 4:30 in the morning.
And she was experienced enough to know that feelings examined too long in the small hours had a way of becoming distorted. You could convince herself of almost anything sitting alone in a kitchen before the city woke up. But she also knew with the same precision she brought to aircraft reports and quarterly projections that what she'd read tonight was not a distortion. It was just the record sitting there in plain language telling her something she should have known years ago and hadn't because she'd never thought to look. She poured the rest of the coffee out and went to get dressed.
There was work to do and she had learned the hard way starting today that work looked different depending on whether you were doing it from the executive floor or from the floor. Garrett's workshop was on Meridian Street, which Caleb appreciated as a coincidence he had never mentioned to anyone at Asterion. It occupied the bottom floor of a converted industrial building, the kind of space that had been a machine shop or a print house in a previous life, and still carried the weight of that history in its concrete floors and highexposed ceilings. Garrett himself was 51, heavy set, with the kind of hands that had been working on engines since before Caleb was born, and showed it. He had started his independent operation eight years ago after a disagreement with a commercial airline over a repair protocol he'd refused to sign off on a disagreement that had cost him his job and in his words been the best thing that ever happened to him.
Caleb arrived Tuesday morning at 7:15 with coffee for both of them. "You look like you got 3 hours," Garrett said without looking up from the carburetor assembly he was working on. "5, Caleb said, getting better." Garrett set down his tool and took the coffee. You going to tell me what happened or are we just going to do that thing where I have to guess? Caleb pulled up a stool and sat down.
He told it straight without editorializing. The night work, the hydraulic fault, falling asleep, the CEO, the laughter, the audience, the security escort. He kept his voice level throughout, which took some effort in certain parts, but he managed it. Garrett listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Caleb had always respected about him. When Caleb finished, Garrett drank some coffee and looked at the carburetor for a moment.
She fired you in front of everyone, Garrett said. In front of everyone. After you'd been there all night fixing a critical fault. Yeah. Garrett was quiet again.
Then what are you going to do about it? I'm sitting here, aren't I? That's not what I mean. I mean the fault, the report. Somebody needs to know that aircraft was a serious problem before you fixed it and that you fixed it alone without being asked on your own time.
Caleb wrapped both hands around his coffee cup. The reports in the system. I documented everything before I went to sleep. It's all there. And if they bury it, they won't.
Caleb said it was the first time that morning he'd sounded tired. Not physically, the other kind. It's too big to bury. If it comes out later that they had a priority 1 hydraulic fault and didn't disclose the circumstances, they've got liability problems that make a wrongful termination look like a parking ticket. They're not that stupid.
Garrett looked at him. You sure about that? Caleb thought about it honestly. Pretty sure, he said. Maybe 70%.
70% is not a number I love. I don't love it either, Caleb said. But I've got work to do and Mia's got a science project due Friday and I'm not going to spend the week I have left before the school break in a lawyer's office. Not if I don't have to. Garrett accepted this though his expression said he wasn't entirely satisfied.
He turned back to the carburetor. There's a Cessna 172 coming in Thursday that needs a full systems check. Owner thinks it might be the alternator, but I'd put money on the voltage regulator. You interested? Yeah, Caleb said, "I'm interested.
He finished the coffee and picked up a work order from the top of the stack on Garrett's bench and got started. The workshop smelled like oil and metal and old concrete, and it felt in its specific way like putting on a jacket that fit correctly. He had not realized until that morning how much of his energy at Asterion had been spent managing the invisible weight of working inside an organization where his value was understood by almost no one with any authority. Here there was just the work and a man who knew the difference between someone who could actually do it and someone who couldn't. It was a smaller life in some ways.
It felt for the first time in a while like his own. Sloan's Tuesday was punishing in the way Tuesdays had been punishing for most of her professional life, but with an additional layer that she couldn't quite shake. She moved through back-to-back meetings with the precision of someone who had trained themselves to function at full capacity, regardless of what was happening internally. But every time there was a pause between agenda items in the elevator, standing at the window of the conference room while someone else was talking, she found her mind sliding back to the file to page four to 17 people. She also, though she was doing her best to manage this, kept thinking about the driveway, about the girl on the plastic crate with the uneven braids.
She couldn't identify exactly why that image kept returning with such persistence. There was something in it that her mind wouldn't let go of. Some detail she was still working out. The braids themselves, she thought, the fact that they were imperfect, that they were clearly the work of someone who hadn't done it before and had kept doing it anyway, morning after morning because they had to. because there was nobody else. She called her assistant at 11 and asked her to find out quietly whether there was a record of how long Caleb Rowan had been a single parent.