Not because she needed him, because the company needed to be worth returning to. She wasn't there yet. But for the first time, the distance between where she was and where she needed to be felt like something she might actually be willing to travel. She went back inside. There was work to do, and it was a different kind of work than she'd been doing, and she was going to have to learn most of it from scratch.
She was 30 years old. She had time. She intended to use it better than she had. The months that followed the Meridian demonstration were not quiet ones, but they were different in a way that Sloan felt more than she could articulate to anyone on her board. The contract with this international logistics conglomerate came through in full, which meant Asterion entered the new fiscal year carrying more weight than it ever had.
More staff, more aircraft and maintenance rotation, more pressure on every team below the executive floor to perform at a level the company had not previously needed to sustain. In the ordinary version of Sloan's life, this expansion would have looked like a pure victory. Growth validated by numbers. The board would be satisfied. The industry publications would write their follow-up profiles.
She would move forward without looking back. Instead, she found herself doing something she had not anticipated and could not entirely explain. She kept walking the building. Not every morning. Some weeks it was twice, some weeks three times.
She had stopped framing it internally as a strategic initiative or a management experiment which had been her first instinct because framing it that way made it feel like something she would eventually conclude and file away. It was simpler and harder than that. She was trying to learn the names of people she should have known years ago. And it turned out that learning names was just the beginning of a longer process that didn't have a clear end point. She learned that Reyes, whose full name was Carmen Reyes, had been requesting an updated calibration rig for the avionics bay for 14 months, and that the request had been denied twice at the department level and never escalated.
She found out by sitting in the break room long enough on a Thursday morning that Carmen stopped calculating whether to bring it up and just brought it up. Sloan approved the purchase the same afternoon. It was not a large amount of money relative to what the company moved in a given week. The fact that it hadn't happened for 14 months said something about the distance between the people doing the work and the people controlling the budget. And Sloan spent a portion of that Thursday afternoon sitting with that discomfort in a way she was becoming slowly more practiced at.
She learned that a technician named Park, whose full name was Daniel Park, had three children under seven and had been driving 45 minutes each way to make the early shift because he couldn't afford to move closer to the facility. She didn't fix that. She wasn't sure she could fix it, and she was trying to resist the impulse to treat every problem she discovered as a problem requiring her personal intervention because that was its own kind of arrogance. But she told Daniel Park on a Wednesday morning over the bad coffee, that she knew the commute was hard and that she was working on expanding the parking benefit to cover carpool reimbursements, which was true because she had started the process the week before. He looked at her with the specific expression of a man who is deciding whether to believe something.
She couldn't blame him. She was also in the spaces around all of this thinking about Caleb Rowan. Not in a way she could easily describe, not as a business problem. She had officially closed his file. The termination stood.
The HR review she'd commissioned had concluded that the firing was procedurally improper, but that Caleb had declined reinstatement, and therefore the matter was resolved as far as the company's legal exposure was concerned. The lawyers were satisfied. The board had stopped asking about it. On paper, the situation with Caleb Rowan was finished. In practice, she thought about the kitchen on Wednesday evenings and what he had said standing at the stove.
And she thought about the file, and she thought about Reyes's voice in the hangar. her the morning she'd fired him. That constrained, careful voice trying to say something that Sloan had cut off before it could form. She thought about all of it the way you think about something that isn't finished just because the paperwork says it is. The thing she kept returning to was the quality of the work. She had managed a lot of engineers over 6 years.
She had hired and fired and promoted and restructured, and she had developed through accumulated experience a reasonably reliable sense of what competence looked like at its various levels. Solid was common. Good was less common. Exceptional was rare enough that you noticed it clearly when it arrived. The way you notice a note played precisely in tune in a room full of instruments that are slightly off.
What the documentation told her about Caleb Rowan's work was that he was operating at a frequency she had almost never encountered. Not because he was flashy. Nothing in the file was flashy. It was the opposite. the precision of the documentation, the fact that he had never missed a recalibration window in 14 years of records, the particular quality of his written findings, which were plain and technical and contained no redundancy and no hedging. He wrote the way a person writes when they are absolutely certain of what they're describing.