I told her I'd ask. Sloan looked at him across the workbench. The loud shoes lady will be there, she said. Tell her to have an opinion about what kind of cake she wants because I've learned that if you leave that decision open, she will generate 17 options and commit to none of them. Caleb's expression moved then fully visibly without any of the steadiness he usually held it with.
Not a performance, just the real thing, sudden and unguarded. A laugh that he didn't try to contain and didn't last long, but was completely genuine while it existed. It changed his whole face, and it was the first time she had seen it happen. And she registered it the way you register something you didn't know you'd been waiting to see. That's accurate, he said when he'd gotten it back.
That's very accurate. She looked back at her operation summary and didn't say anything else. And neither did he. And the afternoon moved through the engineering bay in the amber light. And outside the window, the hangar floor continued its ordinary business of keeping aircraft in the air.
In time, he accepted the position. The announcement went to the company in an email on a Friday morning, which Sloan had timed deliberately because Friday mornings were when the breakroom had its fullest attendance and the news would move through the building in person rather than in the delayed and filtered way that digital communications moved through organizations. She wanted people to hear each other's responses in real time. She wanted the information to be alive in the room. She heard secondhand through Howell that when the email went around in the maintenance bay, there was a moment of quiet.
And then Reyes said simply, "Good and went back to work." And that was the entirety of the public response from the maintenance floor, which told Sloan more about the health of what she was building than any metric in any quarterly report. Caleb's first act in the formal role was to sit down with every department head in the technical division and ask one question. What's the thing you haven't been able to get fixed that you stopped trying to get fixed? He told Sloan about this afterward, not as a report, but in the way of someone describing a thing they'd found worth noting.
What did they say? She asked. Too many things to cover in one meeting, he said. We're going to need a second round. Set it up, she said.
I already did, he said. She looked at him. You could have waited for me to approve the process. I know, he said, but you would have approved it. She opened her mouth and closed it.