They stood for a moment in the open door with the evening air coming in, cool and carrying the smell of jet fuel and autumn, which was a combination that should not have been pleasant and somehow was. "Can I ask you something?" she said. She said it differently than she usually said it, not as a preamble to a business discussion, just as what it was. Yeah.
He said. That morning before you fell asleep, when you finished the repair and documented everything and you knew the aircraft was safe, she looked at the tarmac. What did you think about right before you went to sleep? It was quiet for a moment long enough that she thought maybe he wasn't going to answer. Then, Mia, he said, I thought about whether I was going to make it home before she woke up.
He paused. I wasn't going to. So, I thought about what I was going to make her for breakfast. Whether we had enough eggs. I thought I needed to pick up juice boxes on the way home.
He looked at the sky. That's what I was thinking about, not the aircraft. The aircraft was done. I was thinking about juice boxes. Sloan stood with that for a moment.
She thought about the version of herself that had walked into the hangar that morning. The version that had looked at a man thinking about juice boxes and decided he was lazy. She thought about how complete and certain that version had been in its judgment. And she thought about how that certainty had required her to not look at anything real because everything real contradicted it. I'm going to tell you something, she said.
And I don't need you to respond to it. I just want to say it, he waited. I used to think the people on the floor of this building were the ones I was responsible for getting the most out of, she said. That was how I understood the relationship, resource optimization. I wasn't cruel about it.
I didn't think of it in those terms consciously, but that was the structure. And you changed that not by not by being remarkable though you are by just being a person I couldn't fit into the structure because you were too complicated for the structure. You were a father and a mechanic and a widower and the most precise technical mind I've ever worked with and you were thinking about juice boxes and none of those things were supposed to exist together in the same person according to how I was running things. And when I couldn't fit you in, I laughed at you because I didn't have another move. He looked at her.