What I can tell you is that I am trying to run this company in a way that would not have produced that morning. That's a long project. It's not finished. But it started and it started in this room and you should know that. She stopped.
She was done. The room held for a moment and then began the gradual reconfiguration of a crowd that has received something and is deciding how to carry it. People shifted and moved and began the quiet conversations that would continue for the rest of the day in breakrooms and on the floor and in cars on the drive home. She could feel it starting the specific texture of a company that had just been handed something real and was beginning the slow process of deciding what to do with it. She walked toward the back of the room.
The crowd parted naturally, not from difference exactly, but from the simple physics of people making way. She reached Caleb and stopped in front of him. Up close, he looked the same as he always did, a little tired in the structural way, the kind that lived in a person and didn't fully leave. Garrett was watching her with his arms still crossed, his expression somewhere between neutral and something she couldn't read. Okay, Caleb said.
Okay, she said. You didn't read that off anything? No. He looked at the floor for a moment and then back at her. That was the right room, he said.
And the right people. I know, she said. Garrett made a sound that might have been agreement and might have been something else. She looked at Caleb steadily. I want to offer you something, she said.
And before I say what it is, I want you to know that it's not the same offer I made in your driveway. This is not reinstatement. He waited. I want to bring you in as a consulting technical adviser. She said, "Not a title, not an office, not a full-time position, unless that's ever what you want. specifically to help me build out what the maintenance review protocol should look like going forward.
The document I filed is a starting point. You've seen more fault signatures and more near-miss situations in this industry than most of the engineers on my full-time staff, and I need that knowledge in the room when we're building the permanent version of these policies. She paused. You tell me the hours. You tell me the terms.