She said if I pull the opening without documentation, I take the full liability exposure and Victor's version of events fills the vacuum. If I have the technical baseline, I can go to the board with a complete picture before he does. And if you do nothing, then 300 guests walk into a building with wiring that hasn't been properly reviewed. And when something eventually goes wrong, which it will, it goes wrong on Oralene's watch. He did not respond immediately.
She heard him set something down. The radio volume dropped. I'll bring the documentation tomorrow morning, he said. Send me the address of wherever you need me. He came to Oralene's offices at 8:00 in the morning with a portable hard drive and a printed binder organized by date and site location.
He wore his workc clothes. He shook hands with Leona's head of project development and her legal counsel and sat down at the conference table and walked them through his documentation the same way he would have walked a client through a service report clearly sequentially without interpretation beyond what the data required. The photographs from his March site visit showed the secondary circuit configurations as they had existed before the falsified inspections. The readings he had recorded matched nothing in the contractor's final signoff documents. The written concern he had filed was timestamped, digitally signed, and logged in his own system with the delivery confirmation from the general contractor's server.
It was Leona's legal counsel said afterward almost exactly what they needed. He spent 4 hours in that conference room. He answered every question. He did not perform concern or urgency. He simply provided what he had and explained what it meant in plain terms and let the lawyers and engineers do their work.
When they broke for lunch, Leona found him in the hallway outside the conference room standing at the window with a coffee cup and looking out at the water. Why? She said. He turned. You asked me that before, he said.
I'm asking again. He looked back at the window. The November sky was low and gray, the kind of Seattle afternoon that flattened everything to the same shade because I flagged that site in March, he said. And someone made a decision to ignore it. And if people get hurt because I had documentation that could have prevented it, and I sat on it because of a personal disagreement, he stopped.
I wouldn't be able to look Sadi in the face. Leona stood beside him. I'm sorry, she said for the building. He was quiet. I understood what you were trying to do, he said finally.
That's not the same as it being all right, but I understood it. I crossed a line you had drawn very clearly, she said. I knew I was crossing it when I did it. I told myself it was different because my intentions were good. She paused.