I'll think about it, he said. That's the best I can give you right now. That's enough, she said. Awesome. She spent the two weeks doing the thing she had always done when something mattered enough to be done correctly, which was to resist the urge to script it.
She had given enough prepared presentations in her professional life to know the difference between words that had been crafted to land and words that had actually come from somewhere. The board received the crafted ones. The breakroom got something closer to the real version. What she was planning for the hanger could not be crafted. If it was crafted, it would be hollow and everyone in the room would know it because the people who worked in that hanger had spent years developing precise instruments for detecting the difference between something true and something performed.
She told her senior staff one week out. She framed it simply, a company address, mandatory attendance where possible, a safety and culture review. She did not tell them what she was going to say. Howell nodded and asked no questions. Her communications director looked slightly alarmed and asked if she should prepare remarks, and Sloan said no.
Aldrich found out through some channels she still hadn't identified and called to ask what she was doing. And she told him it was an internal address and he should not be concerned. And he told her he was always concerned when executives gave unscripted public remarks. And she told him she understood and thanked him for calling and hung up. She called Caleb again on the Thursday before.
I'm going to be there, he said before she got the question out. Okay, she said. Garrett thinks I'm an idiot for going. What do you think? A pause.
I think I want to see it. He said, I've been trying to figure out what that says about me. I haven't landed on an answer. Maybe it doesn't say anything, she said. Maybe you're just curious.
Maybe, he said. He didn't sound entirely convinced. Can I ask you something? She said, "You're going to anyway." She almost smiled. "That morning in the hanger, after I fired you and you were walking out, you didn't say anything.
You just gathered your tools and left." "Yeah." "What were you thinking?" He took a moment with it. "I was thinking that you were going to feel bad about it later," he said. "Not because I thought you were a good person or a bad person. Just the report was already in the system. The truth was already documented and you were going to find it and you were going to feel exactly as bad as you should feel.
Were you angry? Yeah, he said, "But it was it was a specific kind of angry, not at you exactly. At the fact that it was possible, that somebody could walk into a room and decide that fast and be that wrong and have enough authority that nobody could stop it." He paused. I've seen that before, not directed at me. I've seen it directed at other people and I've watched what it did to them and I've thought for years that if it ever happened to me I would I don't know fight it more visibly.
He stopped. But when it actually happens you just pick up your tools because there's nothing else to do. Sloan said because there's nothing else to do. He agreed. And because Mia had school in 4 hours and I needed to go home and sleep.
She looked at her desk for a moment. I'll see you tomorrow. She said yeah. He said, "You will." Quote, "The hangar held approximately 200 people when it was full, which it had never been in Sloan's memory for any purpose other than a crisis or a very large delivery event. On the Friday morning she had scheduled, it came close to that." The main floor was crowded in the specific way of spaces that weren't designed for standing audiences.
People found positions near equipment and along the walls and in front of open bay doors, and the elevated walkways along the east side held a row of people who had come down from the upper level offices when the word had gone around that attendance was not technically mandatory, but was also not something people were choosing to miss. She had asked that the AR7 meridian be moved to the adjacent bay and that the space in front of the main floor be kept clear. She hadn't explained why. The team had done it without asking. She stood at the front of the room near the center bay without a podium or a microphone.
The hangar's acoustics were serviceable at full voice, and she didn't want anything between her and the room. Caleb was near the back, as she had predicted he would be. He'd come in through the side entrance and stationed himself at the edge of the crowd with his arms at his sides. Garrett, she noticed, was standing beside him, which she had not expected, and she was glad of it. She did not look at Caleb when she began.
She looked at the room. 7 months ago, she said, and the room adjusted to the sound of her voice and went still. I walked into this building at 7 in the morning and found a man asleep on that floor. She pointed at the concrete. A number of eyes followed her finger.
His name is Caleb Rowan. Some of you know him. Most of the people in this room who work in maintenance know him considerably better than I did. He had been here since 8 the previous evening. He had found a critical hydraulic fault in the AR7 that our standard inspection protocols would not have caught.