Sloan looked at him. He looked back at her. The hangar was completely quiet. Sloan had been in enough high-pressure situations to know when someone was fabricating a story and when they weren't. There was something in the way Caleb Rowan spoke.
No urgency to convince her. No performance of wounded dignity. No demand that she apologize that told her he was describing exactly what had happened. He wasn't trying to save himself. He was just telling her what he had done.
And that somehow made it worse because she had already gone too far. Security, she said. The word came out of her and she watched it land. Caleb didn't flinch. Two of the facility security staff moved from their post near the far doors.
Please escort Mr. Rowan out of the building, Sloan said, and process his termination paperwork immediately. Ms. Whitmore, someone said from behind her. One of the senior mechanics, a woman named Reyes, who had been with Asterion for 9 years.
Her voice was tight with something restrained. "That'll be enough," Sloan said without turning around. She heard the sound of Caleb Rowan crouching down to gather his tools. Unhurried the small metallic sounds of the flashlight being picked up, the socket set being collected, the clipboard, then footsteps, steady and even moving toward the door. She didn't watch him leave.
Instead, she turned to face the remaining employees, 15, maybe 20 people who had witnessed all of it. And her expression said clearly that the moment was over and there was work to be done. And she held that expression steady until people began to move. She walked to the opposite end of the hangar and stood alone in front of a workbench and looked at a set of technical drawings she wasn't actually reading. Her heart was going faster than she wanted it to.
She felt the particular internal discomfort that arrives when a person has done something and cannot immediately construct a justification that holds up. She pushed it down. She was good at that. Caleb Rowan had an 8-year-old daughter named Mia. He had learned to braid hair from a series of YouTube tutorials in the first year after his wife Renata died.
He still wasn't very good at it. The braids came out uneven and the sections weren't always clean, and on the mornings he was very tired, which was many mornings. The results were frankly a little chaotic. Mia had never once complained. She would hold still with the particular patience of a child who understood at some deep and unspoken level that her father was doing the best he could with hands that were built for hydraulic fittings rather than hair.