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. So why didn't you? The question landed between them in the cold air.
Sloan opened her mouth and understood immediately that there was no professional answer to give. No strategic framing, no explanation that didn't reduce to something she didn't want to say out loud. Caleb waited because it was easier, she finally said, "Because I was in a bad morning and you were an easy target and I had an audience." She could hear how it sounded and kept going anyway. And because somewhere in how I run things, I've decided that getting to a decision fast is the same as getting to the right decision. and those are not the same thing. He looked at her for a long moment.
No, he said they're not. Mia slid off her plastic crate and tugged on Caleb's sleeve. Dad, I need help with number seven. Caleb looked down at her. His face changed completely.
Not a performance of tenderness, just the real thing, immediate and unguarded. Give me 2 minutes, Bug. Mia looked at Sloan with the evaluative gaze of a child sizing up an unfamiliar adult. Then she went back to her crate. Sloan looked at the girl for a moment and then back at the man in front of her.
And something shifted very quietly in the way she was seeing the situation. She had come here with a solution, a reinstatement, a great adjustment, a clean resolution. She was realizing standing on this driveway in the cold that the thing she had broken wasn't something she could fix with a job offer. And for the first time in a very long time, she had absolutely nothing to say. She stood there with the night coming down around the neighborhood and the sound of Mia rumaging in her backpack and Caleb watching her without impatience or urgency, just waiting.
And Sloan Whitmore, who had given presentations to rooms full of investors, and made decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars, and had never in six years of running this company been left without a prepared response, could not find a single word that felt adequate. I'm sorry," she said, and her voice, to her own surprise, came out quiet and without any of the professional lacquer she had intended to apply to it. Just the two words, plain and insufficient, in the cold air. "I know that doesn't cover it. I know it doesn't change what happened in front of those people, but I'm sorry." Caleb was quiet for a moment.