He looked at the ground for a moment and then back at her. I don't change what I write based on what's convenient. I know, she said. I've read 14 years of your documentation. A pause.
That's a lot of reading. You have very clean reports, she said. Something shifted in the corner of his expression. Not quite a smile, but in that direction. It was the first time she had seen anything like it directed at her.
You could have just said, "Thank you," he said. "Thank you," she said. "For today, and for the other thing." I knew what the other thing was. He looked at her for a moment with that steadiness she'd seen in the hanger and the kitchen and the driveway. And then he said, "Get the delivery done." and walked out into the dark.
Um, the delivery went on Friday. The client's pre-acceptance check ran clean. The account manager called Sloan afterward and used the word relieved, which was not the word she had been hoping for, but was honest and therefore preferable. The contract remained intact. The relationship survived.
She sent Caleb's invoice to accounts payable the same day with a note attached that said, "Process immediately and it was paid by end of business." What she did not expect, what she would not have predicted if anyone had asked her, was what happened in the hangar the day after the delivery. She came in for the early shift the way she'd been doing. The morning crew was there, the usual rhythm of equipment and coffee, and people moving with the particular purposeful half speed of the first hour before everything was fully running. She poured coffee from the machine near the breakroom door and was standing with it, not yet engaged in anything, when Daniel Park came over. It was one of the younger technicians.
She had been learning this, that she had mentally categorized people by department and function before she had started registering them as individuals. And Park was 29 and had the youngest of his three children a little under a year old, which she knew because she had asked about the baby on a morning when he'd looked particularly depleted. "Can I tell you something?" he said. "Sure," she said. He looked at his coffee.
When Caleb was here on Tuesday, when he walked through and found that fault in what, 20 minutes? 22, she said. Right. He looked up at her. We've all known for a long time that he was the best tech who ever worked here.