Your call. Same desk, he said. Okay. I want to bring Garrett in on the vendor qualification process. he said, not as an employee, as an independent reviewer. He knows the independent maintenance market better than anyone on your current staff.
And if you're going to build a protocol library worth anything, you need that knowledge in the room. Done, she said. I'll have legal draft the consulting terms. He'll want to review them line by line. I know, she said.
Tell him to take his time. Caleb looked at the engineering bay around them, the drafting tables, the mounted technical drawings on the far wall, the window with its view of the main hangar floor where the afternoon crew was moving through their rotation. He had a particular way of looking at a space that she had noticed over the months of working beside him, which was that he actually looked at it rather than through it. He registered what was there, the specific aircraft in the bay, the specific people working on them. He seemed to understand at some operational level that the details were the thing itself and not just its surface.
Mia turns 9 in 3 weeks. He said the shift in subject was not actually a shift. She understood that. I know, she said. She asked if the loud shoes lady is coming to her birthday.
What did you tell her? I told her I'd ask. Sloan looked at him across the workbench. The loud shoes lady will be there, she said. Tell her to have an opinion about what kind of cake she wants because I've learned that if you leave that decision open, she will generate 17 options and commit to none of them.
Caleb's expression moved then fully visibly without any of the steadiness he usually held it with. Not a performance, just the real thing, sudden and unguarded. A laugh that he didn't try to contain and didn't last long, but was completely genuine while it existed. It changed his whole face, and it was the first time she had seen it happen. and she registered it the way you register something you didn't know you'd been waiting to see. That's accurate, he said when he'd gotten it back.
That's very accurate. She looked back at her operation summary and didn't say anything else. And neither did he. And the afternoon moved through the engineering bay in the amber light. And outside the window, the hangar floor continued its ordinary business of keeping aircraft in the air.