I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Sloan almost smiled. I have one more thing I need to say and then I'll go, she said. I'm not coming back with job offers. That's not what this is.
I came because there are 40 people in that hanger who watched what happened and I can't fix what they saw, but I can start doing things differently and hope that eventually that matters. And I came because I needed you to know that I understand what I actually did, not just that I made an HR error, what I actually did. Caleb was quiet. What did you actually do? He said finally.
It wasn't a test. He seemed genuinely curious how she'd describe it. She thought about how to say it without making it about her. I had a man in front of me who was doing something I couldn't do myself, she said slowly. Working that hard, caring that much, and still being precise about the work.
And I think some part of me when I walked in and saw him on the floor, some part of me needed it to be weakness. Because if it was weakness, I didn't have to look at it too closely. I could just be above it. She stopped. That's not a good thing to admit, but it's what happened.
Caleb looked at her for a long moment. "That's honest," he said. "It's the least I owe you." He unfolded his arms and turned back to the stove and lifted the lid on the pot and stirred. "You should probably go," he said, not unkindly. "We're about to eat dinner, and Mia has questions about the solar system that are going to require my full attention." "Right," Sloan said.
She stood up and picked up her bag from the floor. "Thank you for letting me in. You drove across the city twice, he said. Seemed rude to leave you on the porch. She walked to the door.
She had her hand on the knob when he spoke again. Sloan. She turned. He was still facing the stove. You asked the right question on Monday when you said why I didn't wake up in time.
But you asked it too late. You already had your answer decided. He paused. Start asking before you decide. That's the whole thing.
She stood there for a moment with that. Then she opened the door and went out into the night. The 10 days before the Meridian demonstration flight were among the most demanding of Sloan's professional life, which was saying something because most of her professional life had been demanding. The replacement of the hydraulic actuator had set back the pre-flight certification sequence by 36 hours, which cascaded into every department simultaneously and required a reorganization of schedules that made absolutely nobody happy. On top of that, the board had gotten wind of the termination and the technical fault through some channel Sloan couldn't immediately identify, and two board members had called within 48 hours of each other to express concern.
Not about the fault, not about the safety implications, but about the optics of a wrongful termination story emerging during a high-profile demonstration event. She handled both calls with more restraint than she felt. The fault was identified and repaired, she told them. The aircraft is safe. The demonstration will proceed.
And the mechanic, said the first board member, a man named Aldrich, who had been on the board since before Sloan took over and had opinions about everything. That's an internal HR matter, Sloan said. Is it being managed? I'm managing it personally, she said, which was true, though probably not in the way Aldrich meant. The second call was from a woman named Carver, who was more direct.
The concern, Carver said, is that if this becomes a public issue before the demonstration, our clients representatives are going to have questions we don't want to answer in front of cameras. Then we make sure it doesn't become a public issue, Sloan said. How? By doing the right thing, Sloan said, which generally has a lower chance of becoming a public issue than the alternative. Carver was quiet for a moment.
That's not a strategy, Sloan. It is, Sloan said. You just have to believe it works. She hung up and looked at the ceiling and acknowledged privately that she had no idea if it would work, but that the other options felt like things she wasn't willing to do anymore and she wasn't entirely sure when that had happened. She spent those 10 days doing something she hadn't done since the very early years of the company before the growth made it impractical or before she had convinced herself it was impractical.
She started walking the building, not in the way executives walk buildings, which is purposeful and project specific and involves an entourage. She walked it the way she used to when it was smaller, when she knew every person by name and the work felt close enough to touch. She showed up to the early shift before the management team arrived. She sat in the breakroom near the hanger and drank bad coffee out of a machine that dispensed it in a paper cup with a styrofoam shell and was almost certainly a health hazard. and she let people talk at her or not talk at her depending on what they felt like. Most of the mechanics didn't know what to do with this initially.
There was a weariness in the room when she came in. The instinctive recalibration of people who have learned that unexpected attention from authority usually means something is wrong. She recognized the weariness and didn't try to dispel it with reassurances. She just kept showing up. On the fourth day, a woman named Reyes, the same Reyes who had tried to speak up in the hangar the morning of the firing, sat down across from her with a coffee of her own and said without prelude, "Are you going to tell us why you're doing this?" "No," Sloan said.