She looked up at Sloan with the frank curiosity of a child who hasn't yet learned to disguise it. "Hi," the girl said. "Hi," Sloan said. Caleb heard the voice and came out from under the hood. He looked at Sloan for a moment without speaking.
He had changed out of his workclo. There was still a line of grease along the back of one hand that soap hadn't gotten completely. Miss Whitmore," he said. He didn't seem surprised exactly. He didn't seem pleased either.
He looked at her the way a person looks at something they were expecting eventually, but had hoped would take longer to arrive. "I read the report," Sloan said. "Okay, the full report and your employment file." She looked at him. "All 18 years of it, something passed through his expression.
Not satisfaction, not vindication, more like tiredness, like a man who'd known what was in that file for a very long time and hadn't needed anyone else to read it to understand what it meant. Okay, he said again. I want to offer you your position back, Sloan said. Full reinstatement with a great adjustment. And no, Caleb said the word came out before she finished the sentence.
Not with heat, just flat and certain. Sloan stopped. This was not how it went when she offered things. "Mr. Rowan, Caleb," she blinked.
"Caleb, I understand you're angry. I'm not angry about the firing," he said. He leaned against the side of the truck and crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her steadily. "The firing I can work around. I've got options.
I had options before today." He glanced at Mia, who was watching them both with open interest and not even pretending to write in her notebook. He looked back at Sloan. I'm angry because you stood in front of 40 people and laughed at me and it took you maybe 3 seconds to do it. 3 seconds. You didn't ask me one question.
Not one. And I know you're smart enough to look at a man on the floor with tools in his hands and hydraulic fluid on his arms and think maybe I should find out why. But you didn't do that. No, Sloan said. I didn't.