Not because she needed him, because the company needed to be worth returning to. She wasn't there yet. But for the first time, the distance between where she was and where she needed to be felt like something she might actually be willing to travel. She went back inside. There was work to do, and it was a different kind of work than she'd been doing, and she was going to have to learn most of it from scratch.
She was 30 years old. She had time. She intended to use it better than she had. The months that followed the Meridian demonstration were not quiet ones, but they were different in a way that Sloan felt more than she could articulate to anyone on her board. The contract with this international logistics conglomerate came through in full, which meant Asterion entered the new fiscal year carrying more weight than it ever had.
More staff, more aircraft and maintenance rotation, more pressure on every team below the executive floor to perform at a level the company had not previously needed to sustain. In the ordinary version of Sloan's life, this expansion would have looked like a pure victory. Growth validated by numbers. The board would be satisfied. The industry publications would write their follow-up profiles.
She would move forward without looking back. Instead, she found herself doing something she had not anticipated and could not entirely explain. She kept walking the building. Not every morning. Some weeks it was twice, some weeks three times.
She had stopped framing it internally as a strategic initiative or a management experiment which had been her first instinct because framing it that way made it feel like something she would eventually conclude and file away. It was simpler and harder than that. She was trying to learn the names of people she should have known years ago. And it turned out that learning names was just the beginning of a longer process that didn't have a clear end point. She learned that Reyes, whose full name was Carmen Reyes, had been requesting an updated calibration rig for the avionics bay for 14 months, and that the request had been denied twice at the department level and never escalated.
She found out by sitting in the break room long enough on a Thursday morning that Carmen stopped calculating whether to bring it up and just brought it up. Sloan approved the purchase the same afternoon. It was not a large amount of money relative to what the company moved in a given week. The fact that it hadn't happened for 14 months said something about the distance between the people doing the work and the people controlling the budget. And Sloan spent a portion of that Thursday afternoon sitting with that discomfort in a way she was becoming slowly more practiced at.
She learned that a technician named Park, whose full name was Daniel Park, had three children under seven and had been driving 45 minutes each way to make the early shift because he couldn't afford to move closer to the facility. She didn't fix that. She wasn't sure she could fix it, and she was trying to resist the impulse to treat every problem she discovered as a problem requiring her personal intervention because that was its own kind of arrogance. But she told Daniel Park on a Wednesday morning over the bad coffee, that she knew the commute was hard and that she was working on expanding the parking benefit to cover carpool reimbursements, which was true because she had started the process the week before. He looked at her with the specific expression of a man who is deciding whether to believe something.