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.
Reyes looked at her steadily. She was around 40 with dark eyes and the kind of calm that comes from spending 20 years working on things that had to be right. "Okay," she said. But people are going to keep being weird about it until you do. I know, Sloan said.
So why not tell them? Because if I tell them the reason, it becomes a story about me feeling bad about something, and that's not the point. The point is to actually do it differently, and that takes longer than one explanation. Reyes was quiet for a moment. She turned her coffee cup in her hands.
Caleb was good, she said. It came out simply, the way true things sometimes do when there's no other way to say them. He was the best we had. He never said it. But everybody who actually worked alongside him knew it.
I know that now, Sloan said. You should have known it before. Yes, Sloan said. I should have. Reyes looked at her for a moment longer and then stood up and picked up her coffee and went back to work.
She didn't say anything else. But the next morning, when Sloan came in for the early shift, Reyes was the first person who nodded at her when she walked through the door. That nod cost nothing and meant everything. The demonstration flight ran on schedule. The Meridian performed within its projected parameters on every metric the client team had specified.
The three international representatives stood on the observation deck in their good coats and watched the aircraft climb through a cold, clear sky, and the data came back clean and everybody in the room exhaled at approximately the same moment. After the debrief, the lead representative shook Sloan's hand and said the contract review would proceed immediately, and she thanked him with the professional composure of someone who had not just spent 2 weeks eating bad coffee in a break room and reading HR files at 4 in the morning. Later, after the client team had gone to their cars, she stood alone on the observation deck and looked at the empty airspace where the Meridian had climbed and thought about the forward actuator, about the pressure housing that had been on the verge of failing, about the fact that the aircraft had carried human beings today, in part because of work done by a man who had been escorted out of the building before any of those people arrived. She thought about where to go from here. Not strategically, not in terms of board presentations or press releases or what Aldrich and Carver would or wouldn't say at the next quarterly meeting, just personally.
What did a person do when they had arrived at a clear picture of something they'd gotten wrong for a long time and had enough runway left to actually change it? She had been asking herself that question for 10 days, and she hadn't answered it yet. But she was starting to understand that the answer wasn't a single action. It wasn't a reinstatement offer or an apology in a driveway or even a conversation in a kitchen with a child asking questions from a hallway. It was going to be a long accumulation of different behavior starting now and not finishing for a while and some of it was going to be uncomfortable and some of it was going to fail and none of it was going to feel as clean and resolved as she would like it to feel.
She looked at the empty sky. Somewhere on the other side of the city, Caleb Rowan was in a workshop on Meridian Street, working on a voltage regulator with his friend Garrett, building a quieter life that didn't require anyone's recognition to be real. She had offered him his job back, and he had said no. She understood that now, in a way she hadn't, on the driveway. The question that was taking shape slowly in the space behind all the professional momentum was whether she could build the kind of company that someone like him might one day want to return to.