The position does not require you to be here when Mia needs you to be somewhere else. That is not a perk. That is a condition of the offer, and it's written into the position description. And if any future version of Asterion leadership tries to renegotiate that after I'm gone, the employment agreement gives you standing to hold them to it. After you're gone, he said, "You planning on going somewhere?
I'm planning on being here for a long time," she said. "I'm also not arrogant enough to design a position that only works while I'm the one running things." He looked at the red pen in his hand. He set it down on the document. He was doing the thing he did when he was actually thinking something through.
Not performing consideration, just doing it privately at whatever pace it required. The office, he said, engineering bay, she said. Same desk you have now if you want it or we build you something. Your call. Same desk, he said.
Okay. I want to bring Garrett in on the vendor qualification process. He said, not as an employee, as an independent reviewer. He knows the independent maintenance market better than anyone on your current staff. And if you're going to build a protocol library worth anything, you need that knowledge in the room.
Done, she said. I'll have legal draft the consulting terms. He'll want to review them line by line. I know, she said. Tell him to take his time.
Caleb looked at the engineering bay around them, the drafting tables, the mounted technical drawings on the far wall, the window with its view of the main hangar floor where the afternoon crew was moving through their rotation. He had a particular way of looking at a space that she had noticed over the months of working beside him, which was that he actually looked at it rather than through it. He registered what was there, the specific aircraft in the bay, the specific people working on them. He seemed to understand at some operational level that the details were the thing itself and not just its surface. Mia turns 9 in 3 weeks.
He said the shift in subject was not actually a shift. She understood that. I know, she said. She asked if the loud shoes lady is coming to her birthday. What did you tell her?