The fact that you didn't know who I was should not have changed anything about how you treated me. He said, "That's the whole point. Not of my being here specifically, of everything." He put down what he'd been reading. The question isn't what you would have done if you'd known my name.
The question is what you did when you didn't. Amanda stood in the doorway. She was a smart woman. She was professionally accomplished. She had spent 20 years building a career in human resources with the genuine belief Caleb suspected that she was good at understanding people.
And now she was standing in the doorway of a storage room turned office, looking at the man she had sent to the vendor archive and understanding with the irreversible clarity of a moment that cannot be unseen. That she had spent 20 years confusing familiarity with fairness. "I can't undo it," she said. "No," he agreed. ""What do you want from me?"" He leaned back in his chair and looked at her steadily. "I want you to be honest in that interview room," he said.
"Not careful, not strategic, honest. Because the only way anything changes is if the people responsible for the system tell the truth about how the system actually worked." She was silent for a long moment. "And if I do that," she said. "What happens to me?"
"I don't know," he said. She looked at him. "That's not a reassuring answer," she said. "It's an honest one," he replied. Amanda Pierce stood in his doorway for another few seconds.
Then she straightened slightly, that professional reflex, the spine going to its habitual position of managed composure. And she nodded once and she walked away. He watched her go. He picked up his reading again, but he didn't look at it for a long moment because he was thinking about what she'd asked. "What do you want from me?"
And about his answer and about whether honesty was enough, whether honesty was ever enough, whether a system that had been running in one direction for years could be turned by the willingness of the people inside it to name what it was. He thought about Diane. She had always been the one who believed that people could change, not easily, not without cost, but genuinely in ways that mattered. She had held that belief with a steadiness that had sometimes frustrated him, not because he disagreed with it philosophically, but because he'd seen too many instances where the belief was not rewarded. "The ones who don't change," She'd told him once, are the ones who were never really asked to, not by someone who believed they could, just by consequences.
He thought about that now in the context of Amanda Pierce and her walk down the hallway. He wasn't sure yet which category she belonged to, but he was willing to find out. Victoria Harrington had been conducting herself with the precision of someone walking a very narrow path over a very long distance. She had continued doing her job. She had shown up at every meeting, answered every email, made every decision that needed to be made.