Not marginally significantly. James presented the interim findings in an all-hands meeting that was streamed to every floor standing at the front of the auditorium with his team behind him and a data set that made its own argument without any assistance from the person presenting it. Caleb watched from the back of the room. He had a habit now in these months of watching from the back. Not because he was hiding, but because the back of a room showed you things the front never could.
It showed you the audience instead of the presenter. It showed you the cumulative reaction of a crowd in real time. The nodding, the stillness, the moments when attention sharpened because something true had been said. He watched the room during James's presentation. He watched people lean forward.
He watched a senior director in the second row, a man who had been at the company for 8 years and had been part of the architecture of the old system without fully understanding his own role in it, take out a notepad and start writing. He watched Kelsey Victoria's assistant watch the presentation with the expression of someone who is witnessing something they had been waiting for without knowing they'd been waiting. He thought, "This is what it looks like when a company starts to remember what it was built for. Derek came to Caleb's office on a Friday afternoon in the fourth month. He knocked on the open door.
Caleb looked up. "Mr. Thompson," Derek said. He had started using the formal address which Caleb found both unnecessary and somehow right given where they'd both come from. "Derek," Caleb said, "come." Derek sat down in the chair across from the desk.
He had the look of someone who had rehearsed an opening and then in the moment decided to abandon it. "I want to apologize," he said. "For what specifically?" Caleb asked. Not to make it harder, because specificity mattered, and he'd learned over many years that general apologies were often more about the person giving them the person receiving them.
Derek accepted the question. For the first week, he said, "When I came to your desk and basically asked you to justify your presence and for the month after that, when I saw what Amanda was doing and I didn't say anything," he paused. "I told myself it wasn't my place, which was a lie I told myself because it was more comfortable than the truth." "What was the truth?" Caleb asked.
Derek looked at him. Da. The truth was that the system benefited me, he said. I looked the part. I talked the part.
I moved through this company in a way that made the people deciding things comfortable. And I knew it and I used it. And I told myself it was because I was good at my job. He stopped. And maybe I am good at my job, but I was also good at navigating a system that was tilted in my direction and I didn't examine what that meant for the people it was tilted away from.